Oral History Interview with Duward McAlister

Shurtz: This is Clinton Shurtz, it is June 11th, I am in Fulton, Kentucky, interviewing Duward McAlister. Duward is a World War II veteran, this is for the Kentucky Oral History Commission…survey, and thanks Duward for talking to me today, and I guess…just begin, tell me a little bit about yourself and where you grew up and what was your childhood life like?

McAlister: I grew up in this area, in Hickman County. This is Fulton County, really, but I grew up in Hickman County and went to a little high school, (Beaverton?), a super small school. The last class there was a nineteen and…I graduated in ’39. I think the last class was ’40. They consolidated in Fulgham and then Fulgham consolidated into Hickman County. What 1:00else do you want to know [Chuckling]?

Shurtz: Well I, what was that childhood li…childhood life like? What did your parents do?

McAlister: We were just a farm family. My mother and father were sharecroppers.

Shurtz: Oh!

McAlister: They ha…they, they bought a farm in…the year I graduated from high school, they bought their first home, and…needless to say we moved around, but we moved in the same area there. When I graduated from high school…I went to work at a service station and this might shock you and a lot of people, but my…I went to work at that service station, I worked twelve hours a day seven days a week…I worked from seven in the afternoon until seven in the morning for twelve dollars a week. 2:00Shurtz: Whoa! Was that good money then, or was that [Chuckling]… McAlister: That was what you could get… Shurtz: Yeah?

McAlister: …in a lot of places. But the good part was I got all the cokes and candy and peanuts I could eat [Chuckles – Shurtz and McAlister] Shurtz: So, when did you join the military?

McAlister: I was drafted…October, I went in the service October the…I was examined October the 1st, nineteen and…forty-two—one minute, let me get this right—yeah, October the 1st, 1942. Previous to that I had married Estelle Winston on September the 12th, 3:00just before I was… Shurtz: Oh!

McAlister: …called. I didn’t know I was going to be called, but, and of course too, if you passed your exam, why you got two weeks to be at home, and then I went back on October the 15th, I believe, fift…two weeks wasn’t it. So I actually went in the service, I think, October the 15th, 1942.

Shurtz: So how did you feel about that? Was that an aw…was that—did you just consider that part of life, getting drafted and… McAlister: Well you, if, if you’re twenty-years old at that time, you knew you was going to get drafted.

Shurtz: Okay.

McAlister: It was a matter… Shurtz: Yeah, mm-mm.

McAlister: …of when, and…I wa…I was examined and went into the service at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. I shipped from there to…Jefferson Barracks in Saint Louis, supposedly for six weeks of basic training, 4:00and the best I can remember, we stayed there ten days.

Shurtz: Whoa!

McAlister: And they shipped me to Gulfport, Mississippi, to go through an aircraft school. And I’m not sure how long I was there is, I left there, I’m going to say maybe March of ’43, and went to…Long Beach, California. We actually lived in Santa Monica but went to school at…the…Douglas Aircraft plant at…Long Beach for, and I’m not sure…I’m going to say three months maybe, or something. 5:00I mean, these dates I can’t be sure about. Anyway you, they, you went to this factory school and the, each person was assigned an airplane when they started making it, then you went in there and worked eight hou… I stayed in there eight hours a day just like employees did and watched them assemble that airplane. Then when it went out, your schooling was over there, or, and some of us were unlucky, or lucky, however you want to call it, to get assigned to an airplane, and I stayed, I got an airplane, and stayed there ten days and we spent every day in there, every morning and every afternoon, with an in…instructor teaching pilots to fly 6:00instruments, to instrument-fly.

Shurtz: Okay.

McAlister: However you say that, by instruments or anyway, you—blind flying is what they was doing.

Shurtz: Okay.

McAlister: At the end of that time, they…sent…we flew the airplane to…Nashville, Tennessee. It was our, we assumed the airplane was going to Russia because it had a Russian log with it.

Shurtz: Hum!

McAlister: That’s what the pilot said, I didn’t, I didn’t know Russian language from nothing else, but that’s what they said. And we got to Nashville in May. My birthday in May the 22nd, and I got to Nashville on the, about two days ( ) around the 20th, and 7:00we were just to kill time there, of course we left the airplane there, we were no longer assigned to it, and we were just marking time, and…Nashville not being too far away, after the second day I was there, I told some of them, I said, “shoot, my birthday is Saturday, and…we don’t know how long we’re going to be here, we could get orders today, or we could get orders tomorrow to move somewhere else but, I think there was eighteen of us there. And, I’m talking about mechanics now.

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: And one boy spoke up and he said, “how far is it to your, where you live?” I said, “oh, I don’t know, it’s not too far.” I said, “it’s…about a f…if you was in a car, it’d be three or four-hour drive.” “Well,” he said, 8:00“you ain’t not use to go ask of, I live closer than that and he wouldn’t let me go.” [Chuckles – Shurtz]. I said, sat around there a little bit, and I thought, shoot, you won’t know until you ask. So I went over and went in and talked to the commanding officer of the group, and he wanted to know how I could get back up there in a hurry if they got orders, for he said, “if you get orders you got to be here.” And…I said, “well it’d take us four or five hours to get here.” “Can I call your folks on the phone?” I said, “yeah.” I didn’t tell him we had a little whole country phone, but [Chuckles – Shurtz] anyway, I knew he could get us. Believe it or not, he let me go home.

Shurtz: Whoa!

McAlister: And I rode to Fulton on a bus and I stood up on the bus from Nashville to Martin, Tennessee, 9:00which is just twelve miles from here. That’s how crowded transportation was then. And…I got off the bus down here and just stepped out on the sidewalk and a boy drove by that live—neighbors to us, and (Voice starts quavering) he took me home. I walked in the house at super time. And they (had?) (Cries) all around the table, but anyway, (Resumes normal voice) but I had to go. That was…I got home on a Friday afternoon and we went back up there Sunday and then, then we went to Las Vegas, New Mexico for some training they said, and we got out there and man, you talk about hot! 10:00But anyway, we stayed there two weeks. Then they put us on a troop train and sent us to…Florida, and we stayed there about a week, and then went overseas, went to…when we got to Florida we was at…Boca Raton, which is close to Miami…I think, anyway, we went overseas from Miami, flew us overseas, to India.

Shurtz: Hum! What was that like?

McAlister: The d…the trip over there?

Shurtz: Just being in India.

McAlister: Well…going over there was…now they flew us in transport planes but you didn’t have seats in there. You sat on your barracks 11:00bag… Shurtz: Oh!

McAlister: …and…we fl…we flew on a C-87 which is four engine, but anyway, went through South America down I can’t even tell you where we, we spent—had to spend one night on a little island out in the ocean, Ascension Island, to get repairs on the plane done. It had a fuel leak, and then we flew on into Africa and I can’t tell you from there on how we, I don’t remember the places we hit, until we got to…Karachi, India. We stayed there about a month, 12:00and then they flew us up to Assam at the foot of the Lido Road, and Assam, India is a county or a state, or however they… Now India at that time was…England, you know, was a… Shurtz: Yeah, it was under, under British control then.

McAlister: Right. We were stationed was nothing but tea plantations. They had…and I don’t even know how many airports they had up there, ours was located at a l…close to a little whole village they called (Molanberry?), and it was close 13:00to the…Brahmaputra River, and not too far from the foothills of the Himalayas Mountains. And from there we flew in—our job was to, well when we got there, it was a new air base. In fact they didn’t even have a permanent runway. When we landed, we landed on…metal strips like they had temporary, but it wasn’t long until they had us a hard surface runway. We flew into China, flew supplies into China and I don’t even know, ours was not the only air base up there, and I don’t even know how many they had. 14:00Some said there was four, some said five, located within seventy-five miles of each other up there, in the m…in India. And after we got there and they got things to going, it was like working a job at home. They flew around the clock, if weather permitted. If the monsoon season hit, ‘be a lot of days you couldn’t fly, not a lot of days but quite a few, too much rain, too much fog, too much…bad weather, just…we…they 15:00assigned…no fewer than three mechanics to each airplane, they’d liked to have five but most of the time we didn’t have but three. And when they was flying around the clock, it, most of the bases that we flew into in China, it was anywhere by seven and a half to eight and a half hour round tri…roundtrip. When your airplane was in the air and you wa’n’t on it…you could just go back to the bunk and lay down, sleep, or whatever. But when it come you’re supposed to be there immediately when it come in, because they, they wanted to get it serviced and back 16:00in the air as quick as they could. One mechanic had to go with them every trip. Your duties on there was very little, of course when it landed in China, it was your job to see that it got serviced, ready to go back by the time they got it unloaded. And we had a mechanic, a radio operator, a pilot and a co-pilot was the, was the crew. Bad weather! We lost a lot of airplanes due to weather. They assumed, because a lot of times, most of them that we lost you never heard from again. I mean, they fell in them hills somewhere and…we lost a lot of men and a lot of 17:00airplanes and, but they called it non-combat duty [Chuckling], yeah. It wasn’t exactly the way we viewed it, but that’s the way they called it. It wasn’t bad duty if you got to be in the service…we didn’t have it that bad. We ate sea rations. When we first got over there, you’d go in for breakfast every morning and they’d say, how you want your eggs this morning. But that didn’t last long. We soon had so many people that they couldn’t do that way. When we first got there it wasn’t many of us, and…like 18:00I say, once you was there it was more like having a job at home, you just knew what you’re supposed to do and, and do it.

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: I don’t even know what day we got up there or anything about that, I can’t remember. I don’t even know, I couldn’t tell you the day I left there, and I’ll tell you how I left. We was eating lunch. Now, I knew, after I went into the service and, there was a big family of us, my mother was sick…I had a sister that had been in the naval… She was a RN, nurse, and she had married. She came home pregnant, and developed 19:00tuberculosis, I had a brother that developed tuberculosis, ( ) to make a long story short, our family doctor, after—and I had a brother just younger than me that was in the navy, and my brother-in-law that was married to my sister was in the navy, and our family doctor suggested to my parents one day, said, “you need to get one of them boys home to help you.” And they said, well, they didn’t figure they could do that, and…he said, “do you care if I try?” And of course they said “no.” But anyway, to make a long story short, the Red Cross, he got a hold to the Red Cross and they got my discharge started.

Shurtz: Oh!

McAlister: So I came home, I’m and I can’t tell, I think it was in August of ’44 20:00when I got home. It was tobacco-cutting time, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but tobacco growers will [Chuckling].

Shurtz: I spent, I spent the last semester talking tobacco (farm?) so I’m… McAlister: Oh, did you?

Shurtz: Yeah [Chuckles – Shurtz] McAlister: Okay, anyway that’s what we was doing when I got home. The min…I got home one day and the next day I helped my neighbor cut tobacco, but anyway. That was my service tenure.

Shurtz: Did you have any…scary flights in there where the plane malfunctioned or anything?

McAlister: N…not any malfunctioned, we had…one trip I made over, it happened to be that our commanding officer was the pilot that day, and, and he…had been an old airlines pilot, 21:00and the weather was bad, and we got up, started to cross, and…got up over the clouds and you could see, now this is the day that they hadn’t flown any that night, so all the airports, ever how many there was in our area, put an air, airplanes in the air at, early in the morning, I don’t remember what time we got, maybe six o’clock, five, four o’clock—no it wouldn’t have been that early, no earlier than six, it might have been even seven or eight. But anyway, when we got up over the clouds you could see all these airplanes heading to China, and…then all at once here come a big black cloud. We was flying right into it, and most of them you started hearing called back in you know, they 22:00was turning around, turning around, because it was…that’s when you got the ice, when you started messing with them clouds. A lot of them turned around, our pilot never said a word; he just kept flying. In fact the co-pilot said, “aren’t you thinking about going back home and wait for this weather to get better?” He said, “you know I’ve been over this thing a bunch of times and I haven’t turned around yet.” And we went over, we got to China, and then when we got over there, got unloaded and…they suggested to him that he stay for a while until the weather got better and he left. We went back. When we got back 23:00on the India side of it, we couldn’t get into our airport, the fog just, you just couldn’t see it. Now you get up over them clouds you could see it, but when you come down, you got to come through them, and when you’d get in the clouds you couldn’t see, you couldn’t see nothing, you couldn’t see the ground, you couldn’t see nothing, a little bit of ice forming on the plane and, anyway he kept monkeying around. Now when you flew into China, they only allowed you a certain amount of fuel to go back home on, because that’s the p…fuel was the main thing we hauled over there, I’d say, of course we hauled everything but…100-octane fuel was the most of, I bet it was sixty percent of what we hauled, and I done forgot, but anyway we, if you had a certain amount 24:00of fuel left in your airplane, they’d drain it down to enough to fly you back home. The flight back home usually took about three and a half, three hours, three hours and a half or something, so they drained his down. Of course it was likely, and that was one thing that the mechanics had to do, to see that they didn’t drain it down past the… But anyway, on the way back, when we got back and couldn’t get into our airport then he started going to these other airports around trying to get in, but he couldn’t get in to any of them, but finally we found one at a place called (Tesspoor?) and he went down and you won’t believe, we got in the middle of them clouds and all at once they cleared up and that airport was just as pretty 25:00down there, and he landed her. But when we got down there we had to taxi a long ways from the…landing strip to where the, to the hangars where they parked the airplane. We ran out of gas before we got to the hangar.

Shurtz: Oh!

McAlister: That’s all the close call we ever, we ever had, that I ever had.

Shurtz: So on the, the China side you were just there long enough for them to… McAlister: Just to unload.

Shurtz: …unload, yeah.

McAlister: And now sometimes we’d they’d have freight to bring back, but we load you. We even hauled a lot of Chinese, they said they was soldiers, I don’t know, a lot of Chinese people, we’d bring them back and they went up into Burma and…join, supposedly, what we heard was, they was meeting up with an army up in there, I don’t know, so you, you know, you…couldn’t 26:00talk to them so you didn’t…just hauled them home, hauled them back with us, that’s all we’d do. That was a sight [Chuckles – Shurtz] to get a bunch of them on there, most of them just like I was on my first flight, never been up in an airplane before and scared to death. They were something else.

Shurtz: Did you ever talk to…any of the people in India?

McAlister: Oh yeah, yeah I did, we had…we had, we talked to a lot of the Indians. We even had a…our air base had Indian guards…you ever heard the Gurkha?… Shurtz: No.

McAlister: …tribe—tribe? They were professional soldiers…was a tribe of people that actually grew up, up there in the mountains. They were—most 27:00of the Indian people are small, smaller than us. These Gurkhas were big and being professional soldiers they wer…at that time they were professional British soldiers. They were pretty good size boys.

Shurtz: Did you have opportunities to, I guess leave the base in India and, and go out to the… McAlister: Well we’d go… Shurtz: …community?

McAlister: Well we’d go, we go, we could go up if we were lucky enough to have a day off, we called it, you know, when we knew the weather was so bad they wasn’t going to fly, we could go in to (Molanberry?) which is a little village not far from where our base was. It had a Chinese restaurant. You would get some of the best fried chicken you’d ever eaten in your life [Laughing]. It test good then. 28:00That, that’s, there wasn’t nothing up there, I mean… Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: …no…entertainment, no, it was a…but you’d go in there if you had a… Shurtz: And your…your sister, she was a nurse in the military?

McAlister: Yeah, the navy.

Shurtz: And…does—was she overseas as well?

McAlister: No, she never did go overseas. She went in the navy, met this navy corpsman. He was a…x-ray technician and they married and she became pregnant about—and then wouldn’t, those nurses became pregnant they had to get out of the navy, you know.

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: It wouldn’t be that way now but…then she get, she come home.

Shurtz: And what was your wife doing during the time?

McAlister: She stayed with my parents 29:00and worked at the Henry ( ) (single?) clothing factory here most of the time. Part of the time she worked at the Swift Company where they made butter for the government here in town. And… Shurtz: So then tell me a little bit about life after the war.

McAlister: Well [Chuckling], life after, when I came home…of course I stayed, I was, I felt like, you know, if they, we stayed with my, with my parents for a while, I don’t remember for how long, maybe a year, lived in the house with them, and then we moved out, but I continued to work with Daddy and helped him what I could, and…worked on the farm, and then I went back to work at…Pure 30:00Milk Company, the place I had worked before I said my first job out of high school was that service station and I, I left them and went to work at this Pure Milk Company because I could make fifteen dollars a week, instead of twelve. And then about…three months before I went in the service I got a job up at Swift where I could make about nearly three times that. It was a processing place here in town where they dressed chickens, made butter, made ice cream. I worked in the butter-making department.

Shurtz: Were you still working twelve hours a day?

McAlister: No… Shurtz: No.

McAlister: …no, I di…well some days you would in that butter-making part on Saturday you had to work twelve, 31:00or maybe more, that was…see they shipped the cream in by trains and trucks, and…whatever cream come in, you had, if you worked in the creamery, you stayed at the creamery until they got it processed so that it didn’t sour and…then in…but when I got out of the service I went to back, worked at Pure Milk Company, and I worked there until they started building the atomic plant at Paducah, in the early fifties, whatever year. And I went and worked up there and worked three years, something like that, on construction, 32:00got out of that and come back to the milk plant, plus I worked at the milk plant some and farmed a little bit I, I was trying to get to where I could make a living farming, that’s what I wanted to do.

Shurtz: This was…tobacco farming?

McAlister: Well, we raised tobacco and… Shurtz: Yeah. What else did you… McAlister: Corn, whatever, you know.

Shurtz: Okay.

McAlister: Milked a few cows, a little milk…but I could never get started, and…I worked, I continued to do that, farm a little bit and worked at the milk plant, worked as a route salesman some, I worked in the plant some. (And liked to go?) jump 33:00forward a little piece, when General Tire come here in 1960. I went to work with General Tire, I went to work in plant protection, and I worked there until I retired when I was sixty-two, twenty—I worked there nearly, hardly twenty-five years, nearly twenty-four, about twenty-four and a half years. I retired in May, if I had stayed there until September the 19th, I’d have been twenty-five years. And I have been piddling ever since then.

Shurtz: Where you piddle at?

McAlister: Just this house and the yard.

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: And now, I am eighty-six years old and don’t take much piddling to do me in? 34:00Shurtz: [Chuckles – Shurtz] Well, you don’t look it, so.

McAlister: Huh?

Shurtz: I said you don’t look it.

McAlister: That’s what everybody says… Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: …but I tell them, well I don’t know about the looks, but [Laughter – McAlister and Shurtz], yeah.

Shurtz: Have you ever been involved with any…veteran activities or any, anything like that?

McAlister: No, I never have…I, I’m not a joiner?

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: You know… Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: And…no. The VA‘s been good to me for several years I go to the VA doctors.

Shurtz: So…during the war, what was your…what was your attitude about what was going on in the world at the time, was it… McAlister: In World War II?

Shurtz: Yeah. 35:00McAlister: I felt it was necessary, definitely, and I felt like a traitor when I came home.

Shurtz: Hum.

McAlister: You know, even though I knew there was working hard at home, but they was making it, and…I guess that was…like, like I told you at the start, I wasn’t in the service all that long. But I didn’t anticipate when I, when I went in, I figured I would be in there until the war was over (Clears throat), but I didn’t hardly stay that long.

Shurtz: How much longer did the war go on…after you came back…from the military?

McAlister: Well now, I came home in ’44, I’m going to say about August of ’44, and when did it end? Forty…you, 36:00I don’t wha… Shurtz: I think, I thought, I th…it ended in forty-four, is that right?

McAlister: Huh…I’m not sure.

Shurtz: Hum! It didn’t last too much longer.

McAlister: No, no, it didn’t last too much longer, but…I can, I can go show you where I was when the war was over, I remember Estelle coming, me and Daddy was working over in the field and Estelle come over there and said they’d announced, you know, the war was over. Japan surrendered, and I can go show you exactly where we was when she come and told us that.

Shurtz: What about your…family, kids and… McAlister: We had a son and a daughter. Our son, Dwayne, was born in 1946, March the…3rd, 37:00born on my daddy’s birthday, and Cathy our daughter was born March the 8th, 1952. We just have the two children. Dwayne died December the 1st, nineteen…I mean 2005, I, ten, December the 1st, 2005, and…our son-in-law died in 1999 and I can’t tell you what…maybe oc…middle of October some time, I’m not sure. He was a horseman. He loved to ride horses and the horse run through some bushes and drug him off, 38:00she didn’t throw him, she just drug him off and he had a spinal injury and…our son lived in Baltimore, Maryland and he is, he had three children, and he, he developed two blood clots and cancer up here in his throat, and…he died December the 1st, 2005, right after that we found out that Estelle had cancer and she died June the 3rd last year, two thous…it was 2007, wasn’t it? Yeah. 39:00Shurtz: Do you have some grand kids you mentioned earlier?

McAlister: Oh yeah, we got them three in a group down there, now that’s Dwayne’s children. That’s some them two pictures there that’s when they’re small and that’s when they’re bigger, and then our daughter, her picture ain’t even up there, is it. She is over here. She’s got, Cathy’s got one son, and they live in Wichita, Kansas now, and that’s two great granddaughters yonder.

Shurtz: Oh!

McAlister: They are adopted. You can tell they are not sisters [Laughter – McAlister and Shurtz]. Travis adopted, and his wife adopted them. We lived in India, in them, 40:00we lived in bamboo huts…they, somehow they’d strip that bamboo and then they plaid it, and make walls out of it. I think I, I think I got a picture, let me (Voice fading), you can see one picture of that. [Long Pause] 41:00McAlister: Yeah (Soft whistling sound) ( ) time, it flop right over …(Turning pages sound) ( ) unless you’re in a hurry, here it is… Shurtz: No-no.

McAlister: …here it is.

Shurtz: No, not in a hurry at all.

McAlister: Here they are. 42:00Now when I said a while ago there is the old mountains we was flying over. That’s the way it looks above the clouds when you…I thought there was one in here showed that bamboo hut.

Shurtz: (One of the?) is one of these you?

McAlister: No.

Shurtz: That?

McAlister: No that’s two boys I was stationed with over there, this boy here now he is a homeboy here. He is stationed up in Alaska and…there is three boys that I was with in Gulfport, Mississippi in school. That, the belly of the airplanes, that’s the old C-46. 43:00This boy right here was from Nebraska. His last name was (Hatsenbiller?). He was…flying an airplane just ahead of us one morning, and we was going into Kunming, China and he had to make a circle over a lake to go into the airport to land, his airplane was just ahead of us and it blew up.

Shurtz: Whoa!

McAlister: Probably loaded with fuel, I don’t know. Just the one ball of fire and they fell in the lake. This boy here, he is from Minnesota. I don’t know where that…them 44:00mountains see they, we flew the closest way that, if the weather was pretty, and at night time, we flew the, right over the Lido Road. You’ve heard of the Lido Road?

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: The road that they built, you know, from India into China, supposedly to get supplies in there. Well, they couldn’t, it wasn’t hardly finished when I was over there. But they decided that, they would never get enough supplies in and they started this transport outfit, it’s what I was told, I don’t know. That man there was drafted. He was forty-four years old… Shurtz: Whoa!

McAlister: …when he was drafted, a single man, never, never been married. 45:00He was over there with us. We called him grandpa [Chuckles – Shurtz]. You can tell, he was a, he was a character [Laughter – Shurtz], about half boozed up there [Laughter – Shurtz].

Shurtz: Now he looks it [Laughter – Shurtz and McAlister].

McAlister: Yeah, he was…he was a character, yeah. Well that’s about the story of what I, unless you there is some questions that you, you thought of you want to ask, just ask them.

Shurtz: I’m curio…curious about, and I had asked…a couple of veterans say so far is what…without us getting too political, what do you think about our current situation?

McAlister: (Whistling sounds) you want me to tell you what I told my wife, we was setting right here, she was setting there, and I was setting here, we watched them go in over yonder?

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: I said, Estelle, 46:00we got no more business over there. That’s my opinion.

Shurtz: Sure.

McAlister: In my opinion we could stay over there a hundred years, as some of them are predicting, and they’ll still have their Amish—I mean their Islamic beliefs and they’re not going to cater to ours, and when we think we can change them we are fooling.

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: Huh? Now that’s, it’s…(Heavy sigh).

Shurtz: Do you think the military is changing that way, we’re, we’re, I think most people agree World War II was a justifiable war, you had to do… McAlister: Right… Shurtz: …what you can and stuff.

McAlister: …that, that’s Hitler, you… Shurtz: …and… McAlister: You had to stop it, or, or cater to them, and they was gonna eventually take the world!

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: …in my opinion. 47:00Shurtz: Yeah!

McAlister: And, and this is right reversed. We had…I, I can just set here and it just makes my blood boil. We’ve lost forty-four hundred and some odd people that we know about. Now, I think there’s just talking about military people. We’ve lost no telling how many, and see our mili…we probably got as many American people over there working as contractors they call them, as we got servicemen, and we probably lost another forty-four hundred there. They don’t mention them… Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: …because they’re working for somebody else, they’re working for Mr. Cheney and his organization, and Mr. Bush. Now that’s… Shurtz: Oh, I totally agree with you.

McAlister: It’s an oil war. It’s an oil war, 48:00and you can see what oil has done, four dollars a gallon, and I, I’m afraid that it ain’t going to change. I’m afraid that…I don’t know, I don’t know what to expect.

Shurtz: What, what was your feelings in, during the Vietnam War? Do you, do you see a similarity, or do you… McAlister: Real similarity.

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: I’d, I don’t really…I don’t think that was as obvious as this, but I don’t…I know…I worked with a lot of people that were over there, and…they thought it was unnecessary, and…w…what—well, I don’t know—I, I’m not a Saddam Hussein, is that his name?

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: …probably needed to be dealt in. 49:00But that country over there will never…they, there’s, they are enough like the people in India and China, and Burma, that they have nearly got to have somebody to tell them what to do, maybe not to the extent that Saddam was doing it. Do you see what I am talking about?

Shurtz: Yeah, like his, his, perhaps you’re saying his force kept them behaved… McAlister: Right.

Shurtz: …would that be a good—yeah.

McAlister: He was powerful enough that he could make even his men—enemies behave… Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: …by killing them, and that’s not right, I’m, I’m, but…I don’t think we was right 50:00to take on the job to change it.

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: If the people over there could put up, I don’t know but, I, I just…I, I said that when…I said that when they had that other skirmish over there, when they went in.

Shurtz: The first Gulf War, ’90-’91?

McAlister: I told Estelle the same thing then, I said, we ain’t got no business over there. Now he says, you know, nine-one—the way he keeps going back to nine-one-one… Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: Well, you know who doesn’t you know who engineered that evidently? Every person that they’ve ever found that was involved in the nine-one-one thing were from what country?

Shurtz: Saudi Arabia.

McAlister: Saudi Arabia and they’re supposed to be our friend!

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: And see you don’t hear Bush 51:00say nothing much about them.

Shurtz: No.

McAlister: That’s what I told her that night, I said, if he wants to get the ones that done Nine-one-one, he needs to stop off to Saudi Arabia. But, they were supposedly kissing his butt.

Shurtz: Sure, mm-mm.

McAlister: Saudi Arabia was, still are, because you don’t…I tell you what, I don’t have no time for him. He is a little, he is a dumb, he is dumb. He is dumb! I…I ain’t got sense enough to be president, but I got sense enough to know I ain’t got sense enough to be president and [Laughter – Shurtz] I don’t think he’s got that much brains. And if you’ll think back, when he made the first race, if you remember the Republicans had a list that long of people that were planning to run in, you know, talking about running. I said a list that long, there was six or seven of them, 52:00I think. He wa’n’t even mentioned, until all at once. I have no idea what happened [Chuckles – Shurtz], but all the others pulled out and it was George W. Junior [Chuckles – Shurtz] from then on. They got the money lined up. He couldn’t even run a baseball team while he was in Texas [Chuckles – Shurtz]. He proved he couldn’t do that! I, I, don’t get me com…[Chuckling].

Shurtz: So what, what do you generally vote? Are you, are you republican, democrat or… McAlister: I have been a democrat… Shurtz: Yes.

McAlister: …all my life. I remember when we nearly starved to death. I’m talking about when, when I was a small child. We got by on what you can’t—of course now those times have changed, money is not worth as much as, but anyway, I remember the depression. My mom and daddy 53:00had nine children, not all of them were born before the depression, they were most born after. I was here, Joe was here, Hilda my oldest sister was here, and Forrest came along in 1928. And I don’t know how my mom and daddy made a living. Like I told you, they were sharecroppers—this thing still picking all that up, ain’t it?

Shurtz: ( ).

McAlister: [Chuckling] Gosh somebody think that’s a rabblerousing old man, but I don’t care, that’s the way I feel. They, I don’t know how they made a living until times began to change and they were able to buy a home place, and…and I’m going to tell you something else. I’ve told, I’ve told my children, I told Dwayne that before he died, I’ve told all of them, my generation had the gravy, 54:00because I’m not sure when you get ready to retire that everything is going… Shurtz: Oh.

McAlister: …to be available to you that’s available to me now.

Shurtz: Probably not.

McAlister: Do you know what I’m talking about?

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: And I got sense enough to say that. It ain’t going to be the way some of the people in Washington are thinking now, because they’re going to take it away from you… Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: …and put it in their pocket. That’s what they’ve done with this oil war, them forty-four hundred and some are making fat cats. There ain’t no telling how many billions our vice president has made, that company that he was the head of, they, they get all the contracts just, just walked in and take it, take all the money they want. No bid!

Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: It’s wrong. 55:00And the figures that, on the amount of money that’s been blowed over there, your grandchildren will still be paying on it, not mine, mine will, but yours will. I am afraid (Whistling sounds).

Shurtz: So is there any hope? What do you think about these, you know, well it looks like it’s going to be democrats, do you think it’s going to be Obama?

McAlister: I don’t know whether it will or not.

Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: I don’t know. I—and I, all I’m basing my thing, my thinking is, in all of my life, the democrats are more, done more for the working man, and the r…republicans are always taking it away from the working men and giving it to the…now that’s my way of thinking, and there is more working….

Shurtz: How many things to, to….

McAlister: …people than there is of the…you 56:00know, that’s that… Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: …I don’t know how you feel, I don’t care [Chuckling] really!

Shurtz: No-no, I’m, I’m, I’m with you a hundred percent.

McAlister: I’ve been a democrat all my life. I, I show you though how people change. Now my da…I, I had some uncles that were just like my dad and mother, have anything, sharecropping. In fact some of them didn’t have as much as our parent—my parents had. And it done got to the point I had a couple of uncles that had, back in the early twenties when things got pretty good, they bought farms and paid too much for them, and…the depression hit and they lost them. Well, my daddy never did buy one. He wouldn’t take the leap, and it got to a point during the depression he could borrow money, if he needed it, and then my uncles couldn’t, because they had been bankrupt, 57:00and that made them—one of them, he really thought ill of my daddy over that. Well daddy didn’t set the pattern, but it, it’s, that same uncle and the two uncles, both of them lost their places, my daddy all during the depression had enough horses and mules that he could make a crop. He had to rent a farm somewhere, but he could make a crop, and he could go to the bank and borrow if he needed a hundred dollars, he could go up to the bank and borrow a hundred dollars, if he needed it, without anybody signing for it. One of them uncles, I, I thought he was going to shoot himself. 58:00He went down there and to borrow money, and they told him they’d loan him the money, but he wanted to go get my daddy to sign it for him, ( ). Well he, he really got upset at daddy, he [Chuckling]. Of course he didn’t come ask daddy to sign it either. But he didn’t get the money, but it, it was a…after the depression, when Roosevelt got in and they made the, some kind of a outfit that helped the, somewhere the United States government would back these farmers and… Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: …to buying their home.

Shurtz: Part of the New Deal… McAlister: New Deal… Shurtz: …depression? Yeah.

McAlister: Yeah. They both bought farms, wound up before they died in real good shape, both of them, had a couple of farms a piece…doing 59:00all right. But they cussed the democrats [Chuckles – Shurtz] until the day they died. Daddy used to just laugh at them, he’d say I don’t understand your thinking [Laughter – Shurtz].

Shurtz: Were you ever…any of the places you worked unionized?

McAlister: Huh?

Shurtz: Were any of the places you worked unionized, were you… McAlister: Up at the atomic plant… Shurtz: Yeah.

McAlister: …we had to belong to a union up there, didn’t amount to nothing. I worked in plant…I worked in the plant protection up there and…yeah, we, you had to belong to the union, if you worked up there and…didn’t do anything, only we just paid dues [Chuckling].

Shurtz: Mm, yeah.

McAlister: All they’d feed us, they’d have a barbecue once a year for us [Chuckles – McAlister and Shurtz], but…no, after I worked at General Tire,I was a salaried employee all the time and… Shurtz: Uh-huh, yeah.

McAlister: …I, I didn’t…I 60:00know what union’s done, and I’m not against them, I mean I wasn’t against them then and, but it just so happen that the job I had didn’t, didn’t call for me to be a union member. But I’m for the poor man, and I feel like I, I don’t know about Obama, I’m scared, I really am. I, I w…I worry, but I would worry about her. She’s got, I’m not worried as much, but I…in other words, the three people who we had a choice of, right there on the last, I don’t know about any of them. I really don’t. I would doubt that I’d vote for her, I, I b…Obama’ll have to do something that I haven’t seen if I don’t vote for him. 61:00But I’ll still be a little bit there, first place, if he is elected, this is going to sound racist, and, and I try to think that I ain’t, but I am, a little bit.

Shurtz: Sure, yeah.

McAlister: I, I can’t, and I have told many black people that, I said, I’ll te…you know, they, I’ve got a lot of good black friends… Shurtz: Mm-mm.

McAlister: …I mean, good friends black persons, super good friends of mine, but I’ve told them. I can’t be completely—and they understand it, because they’re just like me, they don’t want, like one of them told me one time, he said, you get upset because a black boy might marry a white girl or the reverse. You don’t like to see it. He said, well let me tell you something, the black people don’t like to see it either. 62:00And I think he is being honest, a lot of them won’t be that honest.

Shurtz: Sure.

McAlister: I know what black people think of me, even my very best friends, even the guy I was talking to there, right there. If I was involved with some black person and a problem, he’d, he might turn against me a little bit, I don’t know, you know…but what I’m saying is, there’s going to be things come up when Obama is going—if he is the president—he’s going to be dammed if he is or if he ain’t, whatever he does. He is going to come so, he’s going to have some decisions that he ain’t never dreamed about, I’m sure, that are going to be hard for him to make, and I don’t know whether he is…going to make the right one or not. I hope so, if he is the president, 63:00I hope he does. But this war over there, now they got such a figure, I bet you right now the federal government couldn’t tell you within five billion dollars of what that war has cost, because I don’t think they’ve kept that close a…they talk about figures up there that scare me, scare me to death. It’s like when that oil the other day took that, the market took ten dollars, was the last Friday, went up ten dollars in one day?

Shurtz: Oh yeah.

McAlister: I know that…I turned the TV off and went out, I just…when I heard that, I don’t want to hear more of that. 64:00I just ain’t, I’m not, well I can, I couldn’t make decisions like some of them people have to make, I ain’t that type of person, I just ain’t that.

Shurtz: Well, I guess we can cut it off here.

McAlister: Well… Shurtz: …it was a wonderful interview, thank you.

McAlister: Well I don’t… “END OF INTERVIEW”