INTERVIEW


INTERVIEW       
       
Cecil E. Davis  
        
        
        

YEAR    
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
2007    
        
        
        
        
        
        
        

GRAY COUNTY ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW



NAME: Cecil Davis

DATE: February 21, 2007

PLACE: Cimarron Kansas

INTERVIEWER: Joyce Suellentrop



PROJECT SERIES: 
Veterans Oral History Project for Gray County

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:

Cecil Davis was drafted in 1941 before Pearl Harbor. He was trained during basic training in mechanics, but never served as a mechanic because he was placed in the 115th General Hospital Unit. After serving in Washington State, he was sent to England where his unit set up a hospital to treat soldiers that were wounded. They followed the war up the Rhine and helped set up a temporary hospital in Castle Germany. He then had enough points to come home and be discharged in 1945. He returned to go to college in Emporia on the GI bill and later receiving a master's degree in business from Denver University. He taught school for many years and retired in Garden City.



SUBJECTS DISCUSSEDCOMMENTS ON INTERVIEW:

Cecil's service in the field hospitals and baseball, boxing and racing experiences while in the service were discussed. His travels in Europe and Germany took him to some historic sites. After the war he taught school in Liberal and Garden City Junior College. After retiring from teaching he still farms.



SOUND RECORDINGS: 60 minute tape



LENGTH OF INTERVIEW: 1 hour

RESTRICTIONS ON USE: none



TRANSCRIPT: 20 pages











` ORAL HISTORY

Davis, Cecil E.


Interview Date: February 21, 2007




Interviewer: Joyce Sullentrop (JS)

Interviewee: Cecil Davis (CD)

Tape 1 of 1

Side A



JS - Where were you when the war was started? Do you remember?

CD - I was in Camp Grand, Illinois.



JS - So you were already in the service?



CD - I went in at a Selective Service time back in when you went in for eighteen months. I was already in and that is where I was, in Camp Grand, Illinois.

JS - Do you remember what you thought? What did you think when you heard the news?

CD - It was on a Sunday morning and I thought, ``Well, Japan finally got around to starting the war.''



JS - Did you think that you would be going?



CD - Yes, since I was already in the Army at that time, I figured they would probably send me overseas pretty soon, but they didn't.



JS - You would have been drafted in 1941?

CD - In November of 1941.



JS - Right before Pearl Harbor. Where did you do your basic training?

CD - What I had was in Camp Grand, Illinois.



JS - Could you describe what you had for training there?



CD - Just military training and I was also working as a mechanic at the time.



JS - Did you choose to be trained as a mechanic?



CD - Yes.

JS - Were there other people from Cimarron who were there with you?

CD - No not there, there were five of us who went down to Fort Leavenworth to start with, but I was the only one that went on to Camp Grand, Illinois. I don't know where the rest of them went.



JS - Then what happened after war was declared?

CD - They left us around there for a couple more weeks and then they shipped me out to Fort Lewis, Washington. I went up there in a medical unit and that is where I was in the rest of the war. Not there, but in the medical service.

JS - What did you do in that unit?



CD - I gave shots and all that kind of stuff to the new recruits that came through the fort there.



JS - Where did you go after Fort Lewis?

CD - I was there only two months and they shipped me over to an airbase called Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington. I spent my time there; a year and half or two years, I forget how long. I was running the infirmary at that time and gradually got promoted up to staff sergeant.

JS - The infirmary would have been for the soldiers coming in?



CD - Yes and for people who were sick and needed shots and one thing and another. If they were real bad, we would send them over to Fort Lewis which was in Spokane also. It was about ten miles away from us at the airbase. A lot of the airmen were training and needed shots and other things.



JS - Was that your first time away from home when you joined the Army?

CD - I had done field work for various farm people and lived with them while I did that, but basically it was.



JS - The first time out of Kansas?

CD - Yes.



JS - What did you think when you were on that train headed to Washington?



CD - I didn't know where we were going. They don't usually tell you exactly where you are going until you get there. I didn't think much about it, but I knew I was going west. Other than that I didn't know where I was going.



JS - Was it hard to carry out orders?

CD - I didn't think it was. I didn't fight them or anything because it was just something that had to be done.



JS - What about the food?

CD - I had no objection to the food. A lot of people did but I didn't. I thought the food was good enough.

JS - Did you meet a lot of different kinds of young men?



CD - Oh yeah, all from different states and different places, Illinois and New York and so forth. Then everybody is a little different. There were quite a few of them and I would say they were different.



JS - What did you do for fun?

CD - After we got settled down in Geiger Field, we organized a baseball team and I played baseball. I played baseball in high school and I had no problem there. We joined the Spokane City League and took second in that league that summer.



JS - Your duty was, basically, that you would get up in the morning and go to the infirmary and do what was necessary?

CD - Yes.



JS - Do you have any particular memory of a person or a thing in that time?



CD - No not really, I can remember two or three of the guys that played on the ball team. The pitcher was a first sergeant of the outfit. I think he was from Detroit, I am not sure. I can't recall all the guys that played.



JS - You were there a year and a half?

CD - I don't recall just exactly the month that I went out there. I mean when they transferred me over there. It must have been a year and a half because my wife came out.



JS - Were you married?

CD - Oh yes, I was married before I went in. Coming up in four months it will be sixty-six years.

JS - What did your wife do while you were in the Army?



CD - She came out there with me when I finally got settled at Geiger Field. She came out and we spent the next year and a half or whatever time I was there. It must have been longer than that.



JS - Did you live on base?



CD - No, we lived in town. We lived in a great big apartment house. It was tall; we were on the third floor. She didn't live on the base at any time.



JS - Were most of the men married or single?

CD - Most of them were single. In the time that we were over there, two or three were married. As far as I can remember the rest of them were single.



JS - When you were drafted, how old were you? You were born in '18.



CD - I would have been twenty-one or close to it.

JS - Anything else you remember about being in Washington?



CD - In this apartment house, there were four other married couples. Two of them were in the same unit that I was and we would get together and have Thanksgiving and Christmas and this type of thing.



JS - You didn't get back to Kansas during that time?

CD - Yes I did, I had a furlough, but I don't remember what year that was. My wife and I came home. I don't remember when it was; I think it was in the early spring.

JS - Where did you go after you left Washington?



CD - I was in Washington working at the infirmary and I decided to take the Air Corp examination for pilot training. That is what I did, so I got accepted and I left Spokane, Washington, and went to Shepherd Field, Texas. I took some more tests there and one thing and another. From there they sent me to Roswell, New Mexico. In Roswell at that time the war was getting pretty far along. This was in '44 and there in Roswell they decided that they had enough pilots. They shipped me back to the medical unit and I was back in Illinois. I can't recall the camp name. We were organized then into a hospital unit called 115th General Hospital. From there we went to Camp Miles Standish up around Boston. From Boston we shipped out and went over to Farragut, England.



JS - What did you think when you were on that ship going across the ocean?

CD - That ship was the USS America, the biggest ship we had at the time. There were 10,000 of us on that thing including all the hospital units. I don't remember how many nurses we had; fifty or a hundred.

JS - How long did it take you?



CD - Four days to go across there. We asked different people that were running the ship, ``What about submarines?'' They said, ``A submarine can't catch us, this is too fast.'' We arrived at Liverpool and were railroaded up to a place called Harrigut. I don't know how much time I spent there.



JS -Till the end of the war?

CD - No, anyway we established the 115th General Hospital there. We lost one patient, by the way, due to an appendicitis operation.



JS - From where were the patients coming into your hospital?

CD - The battlefield, right from the battlefield, some of them had bandages on and some just had a gauze type thing, depending on where they were wounded. We had some that were pretty severe but we never lost any of those. There was the guy that had appendicitis.

JS - Were they flown over?



CD - I have no idea how they arrived at our place, other than on trains. They arrived on trains sometimes.



JS - Could you describe the hospital? Was it large?

CD - No, it wasn't a single building. It was a bunch of various types of barracks buildings and had wings off several places here and there. The mess hall was in our admissions office in a barracks, which I was in charge of at that time. There were barracks here and there. No one general place at all.

JS - In the admissions area where you were in charge, you took their name?



CD - All that kind of information, the best we could. Some were not able to help us and some were unconscious. Yes, we admitted them there. I was an enlisted man and the officer over me would assign them to various barracks for operation or others.

JS - Did you have a lot of people coming in?



CD - After we got established and set up and everything, yes they were pretty busy. We got a lot of patients from a hospital in Germany. As they progressed further inward we kept getting a few. We were not the only hospital there. There was another one down the road about a quarter of a mile. I think it was called the 116th. We were the 115th.

JS - Was the hospital set up when you went over?



CD - No, we had to do all that kind of thing.



JS - Did you have trouble getting supplies?



CD - The supply man said we didn't, but I know I heard some of the doctors say they wished they had this or that which they didn't have at the time they were operating, but they finally got everything they needed.

JS - Were you over there when D-day occurred?

CD - No, I left the states after D-day. I was in this camp where we were organized. I can't remember the name of it. It was in Illinois. We were organized as the 115th General Hospital and D-day happened while we were there.

JS - You remember hearing about it?



CD - Oh yeah, but we shipped out shortly after that, I think about a week.

JS - It would be a result of D-day because now we were on the continent and we needed the hospitals. Was this a small town in England where you were?

CD - It was actually a health resort town. I suppose five or six thousand, I don't really know.



JS - Did you go into the town?

CD - Yes, I had days or hours off and could go into town. I watched a movie or two in town. There was some kind of concert going on one time and I got tickets to get in to see it.

JS - Did you get to know the English people at all?



CD - I really didn't bother about it because we had the USO Club and when I would go to town, I would spend most of my time in there. There were a few girls that came around, but I really didn't make any effort to get acquainted or anything.



JS - Where was your wife?

CD - She was back here. She was staying here in this town, in fact.



JS - Do you have specific memories of any of the men that you worked with during that period of time?



CD - One fellow by the name of Gus Fish, I can't tell you where he was from, Iowa, I think. I had been in the service long enough that I had accumulated a lot of points. They were shipping people back home on a point basis and I had enough points and he was still in Castle, Germany, when I left.



JS - Did you stay in England the whole time until you came home?

CD - No, I am not sure when we left England. We went across the channel on a boat that held most of us. We went up the Rhine River and were dodging other boats to Camp Lucky Strike. From there we were transported in trucks to a town called Castle, Germany. That was in early spring. We spent Fourth of July there and that is where I was shipped home from. We had been there from spring until October the 23rd or around that.



JS - That would have been in '44?

CD - '45.



JS - After the war; what was it like as you moved into Germany through France? What was it like to see the countryside where the war had been fought?



CD - Pretty well torn up. In Castle, Germany it was really torn up. The buildings were all shattered and they hadn't been able to clean up yet. They said that the 8th Air Force made two passes across Castle, Germany and just wiped it out; that is all there was. We did set up our hospital in a place called General Rimbaud's headquarters. It was big, a monstrous building. I have some pictures of it here.



JS - Do you remember what you were thinking as you moved forward?

CD - I didn't know how far we were going to go into Germany. All we knew is that we left this Camp Lucky Strike and we knew it couldn't be too many miles. I don't really know how far it was.



JS - Was Camp Lucky Strike in a town?

CD - It was a staging area, a great big old flat plateau area where they could park vehicles and organize what they wanted to send different places.

JS - There were no buildings?



CD - Temporary, yeah, there were tents and things but no permanent buildings.

JS - Did it seem organized to you?



CD - Yes, I had no quarrel with the Army at all. They seemed to me okay. I figured they knew what they were doing.

JS - As you moved into Germany, did you have a problem getting supplies or food or anything like that?



CD - No, as far as I know we never had a problem getting any supplies of any kind that I can recall. The doctors were able to scrounge from a manufacturing place out there that was making fine instruments. They got a bunch of instruments out of this manufacturing place.



JS - Did you come in contact with German people?

CD - No I didn't, we established an NCO Club a couple of blocks from where we were in a building for our staging area. There were no Germans involved in the NCO Club. It was just a house we took over.



JS - Could we go back to England a little? There is a photograph in there of you boxing. Was that when you were in England?



CD - Yes.

JS - How did that happen? Was this boxing with the Army?



CD - All those guys that are in that picture were in the 115th Hospital. I don't know how we came to get into the boxing business. Anyway as you know, boxing goes by weights. My weight was one hundred forty-five or so and we boxed in the organization with one guy against another one. We didn't have anyone around to compete with. Other organizations, we did not compete with them.



JS - Did you know how to box or did you just learn?

CD - I had done some boxing. I had done some Golden Glove boxing at one time before I ever went to the service.



JS - Where was that?

CD - Here.



JS - In Cimarron?

CD - Yes.



JS - Who taught you?

CD - I can't tell you his name now. There were three of us went to Hutchinson to the Golden Glove tournament. Harold Davidson, Bernard Rohrbaugh and I were the three that went down there.



JS - What did you like about boxing?

CD - Just athletic, I guess I enjoyed it. I don't think I was exceptionally good, but nevertheless, I went.



JS - Do you remember what pay you were getting in the Army?

CD - I think the first few months were eighteen dollars a month. As you get promoted, which I did, it was more. I don't recall the final amount that I got.

JS - It must have been enough to live on.



CD - Oh yeah, it was then.

JS - Did your wife work?



CD - She got tired of lying around the house so she did go to work. She is real sharp and she got promoted right fast in the Ten Cent Store managing certain areas of it.



JS - This was in Washington?

CD - Yes.



JS - When she came back here, did she live with her parents?

CD - Yes, she was pregnant so she worked at the ASCS Office.



JS - Your first child was born when?

CD - I was overseas.



JS - How did you find out about it?

CD - I got a letter by V-mail from her saying that David had been born and that he weighed almost ten pounds.



JS - When you wrote home what would you write to her?



CD - I couldn't tell her anything because they wouldn't let me say where we were. I could say we had patients come in today and we treated them and that is about all.

JS - How often did you try to write her?



CD - I don't know. I can't remember now, if it was everyday or every other day or once a week.

JS - If she sent a package, what might be in the package?



CD - Cookies or candy that type of thing, something that wouldn't melt. If it melted it would run all over.



JS - Other than your wife and family what did you miss most? Did you miss the food? I guess you had food on the base.

CD - I missed the farming life that I was used to and enjoyed, I am still farming.



JS - That is a long time to be a farmer. Are you out there on the tractor?



CD - Yes, I run the combine every year. My oldest son has retired from his position and he helps during the summer time.

JS - Where do you live?



Interviewer: Joyce Sullentrop (JS)

Interviewee: Cecil Davis (CD)

Tape 1 of 1

Side B



CD - I retired from what I was doing in Garden City, which was teaching in the college. I taught thirty years in the college up there.



JS - What did you teach?

CD - Business, accounting mainly.



JS - When you came home from the war what did you do?



CD - I hadn't been to college so I went to college at Emporia State.

JS - And got a degree in business?



CD - I got my degree in business and finished my masters' degree in Denver University.

JS - Again in business?



CD - I taught at Liberal for four and a half years and then transferred up to Garden to the Junior College as Liberal did not have a Junior College at that time.



JS - When you went to college, was that on the GI bill?

CD - Yes.



JS - Could you describe that because I don't think anyone else that I have talked to did that?



CD - All you had to do was answer some questions that they put out on an application. I can't remember what they were because I can't remember that. Anyway they approved it. You got so much money. I can't remember how much it was, it seems like it was ninety some dollars a month.



JS - Did that take care of your expenses at the college?

CD - Yes, they also had, at the college at Emporia, some trailer houses and you were assigned to a trailer house if you wanted one. You did not have to take it; you could pay your own otherwise. We lived in that for about six months and then Catherine's folks helped us buy a little house. I spent the rest of the two and a half years there. By the way, I went through in three years.

JS - You were in a hurry.



CD - Yeah, I enrolled at the beginning of the second semester and graduated at the end of the first semester, three years later.

JS - You worked hard during that time. Were there other servicemen there?



CD - Going to Emporia, at that particular time, there must have been sixty or seventy of us, mainly the football team. I didn't play football; I was too busy doing studying.



JS -When you got out you started teaching. Did you know how to teach?

CD - I took courses at Emporia for that.

JS - Then you got your masters'. What made you decide to get your masters'? What year was that?

CD - '54.

JS - When did you start farming?



CD - All the time while I was doing this, I was helping Catherine's father during the summers. I couldn't do it during the school year, but as soon as school was out I would. I had been doing that before I went to war.



JS - When you came home, you sort of knew that you were going to further your education?



CD - I really didn't know what I was going to do. Catherine then, encouraged me to go to school so I did.



JS - Let's go back and finish up your service. It says here that your period of service was from 1945 to 1950. You were discharged in 1972. That is not right.

CD - Well, we hadn't talked about it, but after I got out of the service, I joined the National Guard.

JS - Talk about that, I have talked to no one who was in the National Guard. When you came back and got discharged from the Army?



CD - I went to Liberal in January of '49 and started teaching. While I was down there, the National Guard was being formed and needed officers. Since I had all this experience in the Army they decided that they could give me a commission. I joined the National Guard in 1949 and stayed with them sixteen and a half years so that might be where that '72 came in.



JS - What was the National Guard like then? What did you do; did you have meetings?

CD - Oh yeah, every Monday night, we were an artillery battalion. We had what they called tanks. They had artillery pieces fastened to the center of them. We had training every Monday night in those and other things, communications and stringing up telephones. Every summer you went on a two-week bivouac and actually set up the communications and fired the guns.

JS - That would have been to another state?



CD - Most of the time it was, yes. In fact I don't think we ever had a two-week bivouac in Kansas. We had it in Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Missouri. I don't remember the other states where we had them.

JS - During this time was the Korean War. You were not called up for the Korean War?



CD - No, I thought when I went back to work on my masters' they might call me up then, but they didn't. They took the big cheeses of the outfit, but they left the little officers around.



JS - As many years as you were in the National Guard, was the unit ever called to do anything.

CD - It wasn't a state request or anything, it was just our own local commander and the volunteers of the unit that were. We had a flood in Liberal one time and there was a lot of help needed to get the cars out of the mainstream of the flood. The National Guard helped with that. I think it was strictly a volunteer basis.

JS - When you look at all the years that you spent in the National Guard, do you think it is valuable?



CD - Yes, I learned a lot.

JS - You left the town of Castle in Germany because you had earned enough points to come home. You were shipped home, you didn't fly home?



CD - We came home on a little old boat. Henry Kaiser was building ships out on the West Coast. We came home on one of those tubs, 450 of us. It made tracks backward faster than it went forward. I remember seeing the Rock of Gibraltar.



JS - You came down through the Mediterranean?

CD - We got by the Azores Islands and an Atlantic storm hit us and we went backward that day.

JS - It was a lot different than the ship you went over on.



CD - I'd reckon it was a lot different.

JS - What was it like being on water? In Kansas we don't have water. What was that like?

CD - It was my second trip, the first one was going over and that one was fairly smooth. Coming back, it is kind of scary at times. In a storm the ship would tip one way or another. When it tipped with the nose down, the propeller that would drive the thing came out of the water and just vibrated the heck out of that ship. I thought it was going to fall apart.

JS - Did you land in New York? Were you glad?



CD - It was Newport, Virginia, I think it was.

JS - When you look back on your experience in the Army, what do you think about it?

CD - I thought it was real nice. I learned a lot.



JS - What did you learn specifically?

CD - I learned how to get along with other people, and do what you were told to do. I enjoyed sightseeing every place I went. I am kind of a history buff, too and I enjoyed looking at all the old buildings and things.



JS - When you look at where we are now in the world, what do you think has changed?

CD - I am not much on politics, but I sure hate the way things appear nowadays.

I think the politicians are as crooked as they can come. I don't care whether they are democrats or republicans; they are just not treating the citizens of the United States right.

JS - When you were in the service during World War Two, were you aware of what was going on? Did you read newspapers?

CD - Every once in a while the USO would have some copies of different papers. They were a few days late if they came from the United States, but England published the news. I think we were pretty well caught up most of the time.

JS -There was no question in your mind about what your job was?



CD - No.

JS - Had your father served in World War One?



CD - The way he told me, he and a couple of other guys had been called up to come up to the railroad station and then the war was declared over with and they never did get in. That is what I remember him telling me.



JS - Did you keep up with any of the people that you knew in the service when you came home?

CD - No, I had enough points to be shipped home and the rest of the guys that I ran around with didn't have. They hadn't been in long enough so they were still in Castle when I left.

JS - Were you home when the war ended?



CD - In Harrigut, England.

JS - Where were you when we dropped the bomb in Japan? That would have been in August of '45.

CD - I was in Castle, Germany then. We must have heard about it somehow. I sure don't remember how.



JS - Were you able to do any traveling in Germany?

CD - Yes, over there, Manheim, Germany is a sports center. They had the Olympics there in '36. They were having some kind of Olympics trial and all the units that wanted to could participate. I got involved in that. I went from Castle to Manheim, Germany and while I was there I visited a town right next to it. It had a wine barrel on top of something; seems like it was a 5000 gallon barrel wine barrel, a monstrous thing. I enjoyed that but I can't think of the name of that town.

JS - When you went to Manheim, how were you involved?



CD - A track meet.



JS - Did you run?

CD - It didn't last. I wasn't any good.



JS - This was when?

CD - This would have been in July of '45, I think.



JS - Was it all servicemen?

CD - Yes, from all over the United States and Europe. It was quite a track meet.



JS - Manheim is the `36 Olympics. That is where Jesse Owens ran.

CD - That is right; they still had the platform there and a few other things. We ran on the same track that he did.



JS - You really did not get to travel a lot?

CD - I really didn't in Germany. We were in Castle and I went to Manheim.



JS - In England, did you get to travel?

CD - I visited York, Manchester and I visited Westminster Church in London.



JS - So you were in London?

CD - That is when I was in Harrigut there, which was when I was traveling in England. I think that was about the size of my travels.

JS - As a historian, is there anything else about your experience that might be important for other people to know?



CD - No, I wouldn't say so. In York I walked that wall that was built around it and that is history of course. I don't recall how long it was.



JS - Let's go back. Before you went into the Army you had graduated from high school. You had lived through the thirties and the depression.

CD - Yes, I had been working on farms for first one guy and then another ever since '34 during the dirt storms. There was a fellow who lived right east of us where I lived up there. His name was Bill Westfall. He was a fuel deliverer and he had a couple of farms up there. I lived right west of him. He found out I could drive a tractor and that was in '34 and '35.

JS - You had to register for the draft, is that right?



CD -Yeah.

JS - How did you find out that you had been drafted?



CD - They send you a letter that says you are to report such-and-such.



JS - Where did you report?

CD - The bus came right by where Clark's Pharmacy is and you got on there.



JS - Where did they take you?



CD - Leavenworth.

JS - That is where you were inducted?



CD - Yes, there were five of us that left that day. I can only think of two of them, Schultz, I think, and Baxter from Ingalls.



JS - Which Baxter?

CD - The one that wasn't real sharp, I can't think of his name now. That is terrible to say. When they got to Leavenworth they decided he didn't need to be in the Army so they sent him back. The other two, I don't remember.

JS - Did you have a physical?



CD - Oh yeah, every time you turn around.

JS - I guess you had no physical problems?



CD - As far as I know, I didn't.

JS - Did you get to come home?

CD - I was only at Leavenworth a day or a day and a half. They shipped us out. I don't know how they separate you, but I wound up in Camp Grand, Illinois, at that basic training at that mechanic school that I was going to.



JS - You really never worked as a mechanic?



CD - No.

JS - You had no training in medical things?



CD - Not a bit, I don't know how they picked a guy like me to work in a medical unit.

JS - Did they have any training for you at all? Did you learn on the job?



CD - That was it. You learned on the job and what officers you had around you would say something to you to help you.



JS - Any other thoughts about your experience or a memory?

CD - No.



JS - Did you ever run into any one from Cimarron as you went to different bases?

CD - I never did, but I told you about the couples that lived in the apartment house out in Spokane, Washington. One time over in England, I ran into one of my buddies that were in the same apartment house with us. That was the only one, though. I don't remember where we happened to run into each other, but he was in the Air Force. His name was Phil. I remember that but other than that, it is the only one I recall seeing.

JS - When you came home, there were other men who had gotten out of the service. Did you talk much about the war experience?

CD - I guess not. I don't remember anything about it.



JS - If you talked to your family about it, what would you tell them about it?

CD - I really could not tell them anything about the experience or what we were doing other than we got the patients and treated them.

JS - Do you remember if they had things like penicillin during World War Two?



CD - They finally got it toward the end, yes.

JS - What did your parents think when you were going off?



CD - I don't know, I had been working around the area here and hadn't been home a whole lot.



JS - Did they write to you and did you write to them?

CD - My mother never did write much and in fact, I don't know if she could or not. She finished the eighth grade and that is as far as she got in school. I would write them every once in a while when I had a moment or two I wasn't doing something else.

JS - Did you bring anything home from England or Germany?



CD - I don't recall a thing that I brought home except a duffel bag and clothes.



JS - This picture is of the desk where you were working?

CD - Yes.



JS - And your wife's picture is on the desk?

CD - Yes, and that is her up there with me. This was in Castle, Germany. It might say on the back.



JS - This is at the Manheim track meet. Did you ever encounter any of the generals at all?



CD - No, highest I got acquainted with were colonels. This picture is of David and Goliath. This might be me.



JS - I want to get to that boxing if I can. What is going on in these photographs?

CD - This is in Castle, Germany and this in Harrigut, England. My wife took care of the pictures. She did a pretty good job.



JS - Is this the barracks that you lived in?

CD - Yes, this is the officers that I worked with and this is some of the men that I ran around with sometimes.

JS - This was in England and this was the boxing team?



CD -Yes, they are all listed on the back. This is a real boxer and a monster and he boxed against Billy Kahn who had boxed with Joe Louis. He had more experience than the rest of us.



JS - Did you have a camera? These were your coaches?

CD - Trainers, yes. I guess I must have had a camera, I have lots of pictures.



JS - The army supplied your equipment?

CD - Yes, this is the last guy I had to fight and I won over him.

Interviewer: Joyce Sullentrop (JS)

Interviewee: Cecil Davis (CD)

Tape 1 of 1

END