In this profoundly touching episode of America’s Veteran Stories, Kim Munson sits down with 97-year-old World War II veteran James Scott. Born in the rural landscapes of Kentucky, James shares his remarkable journey from a modest upbringing during the Depression to the battlefields of Europe. His stories are filled with vivid recollections of his service, the bonds of brotherhood forged in combat, and the resilience that carried him through. Join us as we delve deep into the life of an extraordinary man whose service and sacrifice exemplify courage and dedication.
SPEAKER 03 :
World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and her other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s veteran stories with Kim Munson. These stories will touch your heart, inspire you and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Munson.
SPEAKER 09 :
And welcome to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And the show comes to you because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans back to Normandy, France, for the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in World War II. Returned stateside realizing we need to know the stories of our military and our veterans. We need to record them and broadcast them and archive them. Hence, America’s Veterans Stories. I’m very pleased to have on the line with me James Scott. And I had met his grandson and granddaughter, and they were talking about James. And he’s a World War II veteran and a pretty amazing person. And I thought, oh, my gosh, let’s see if we can… get an interview with him so here here we do we have this and this is just really great i’m excited about it so james scott is 97 years young and james scott welcome to the show thank you so much for having me on well tell us james first of all where did it all begin where did you grow up
SPEAKER 04 :
I was born in Harlan County, that’s southeastern Kentucky, in a place called Brownish Creek. And you never know when you’re at Brownish Creek because there’s nothing there but a creek. It was very rural in 1927, of course, and there was a large family of us, I think, a family of 12, but some of the older ones grew up while the younger ones, and I was down on the line somewhat, but my remembrance is somewhere maybe like I was five or six years old, and I date to six because I had… There were twins born, a boy and a girl, into my family, and I remember that. So it was a mountain farm we lived on. Originally it was a 258-acre, I learned in recent years, a land grant to a particular person, Taylor, but to it was added quite a bit of land because… A lot of the land in eastern Kentucky was brought up by a conglomerate, I understand, out of Pittsburgh in the late 1800s, early 1900s, for like 25 cents an acre, which included all the resources, the timber and the extensive coal fields. And our farm was, it was a lease job for… a pittance a year, mostly to care for the environment, trees, and so forth and so on. And out of that, we dug a living through my younger years. It was, of course, depression. My father worked in the coal industry when it worked, but in the Depression, there was not a lot of work, so we did farming work. I had a brother a couple years older than I, and he and I ended up of the only boys at home as other girls, but we tended to inherit the job of doing farm things that much older people would normally do, like learning to plow early and chop weeds and plant corn and potatoes and all the stuff that goes with it because our livelihood mostly depended on that. Feeding of the animals, pork for instance, because we had no way to preserve beef, so hence we didn’t have any beef. Pork you could salt down and cure and it would last a long, long time. Dig potatoes and store them away and other produce, mostly with very little money required, which was not available anyway in the Depression years. So I grew up with that until I was a teenager, went to school, had an elementary school for seven months because the winters were so bad the children could not get to the one-room schoolhouse because the roads were just muddy paths that was hardly accessible. negotiable for anything other than a horse or a mule walking on it. So we walked to school and the winter weathers were so bad that school was out by the Christmas time, usually the end of it. So other than that, there was no school in the area until the CCCs came along and the latter 30s and built a high school. Unfortunately, it was not convenient for us to cross a couple of mountains from us, and we had no way of getting there, paying the board, so I ended up with an eighth grade education, and the early part of World War II, I was still a younger person, and there was older boys that I knew, cousins, and Relatives and so forth early on was drafted, and I was acquainted with what was going on in other places, so I left down there. I knew it was a very difficult place. And I’ve often thought the Lord called me out. I don’t know what he had in mind for me doing, but I left down there when I was 16, and we had some cousins who lived here in the Cincinnati area. I stayed with him and worked, I think, maybe about a year and a half. You could get a job washing dishes in a restaurant, bussing dishes, and so forth. So that’s what we worked at. So my brother was two years older. He was drafted and gone, and my cousins that I was used to hanging out with also. I was 17, and I just wanted to get my… put in the door, so I asked my father, and he didn’t want me to. He would have had to sign okay for me, but he didn’t want me to do that. So I got the idea to just go down to the draft quarter by 17th birthday and register as 18, and I did that, and bingo, I got drafted. So I took care of that situation.
SPEAKER 09 :
What year was that, James?
SPEAKER 1 :
1944. 1944.
SPEAKER 04 :
1944. That got me out of the mountains. A lot of people love the mountains. I have no hatred for it. I just don’t want to be there. I see… I saw so many things at the time, and even today, large families without any medical treatment. And I could elaborate on this, I think. There was a large family of us, and we lost four siblings before they were two years old.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, my gosh.
SPEAKER 04 :
It did later one nine. And I’ve had friends talk about how wonderful it was. I said, it’s okay, but go up there and look at the Scott Cemetery and look at all the babies’ graves. So that didn’t sour me on it, but I didn’t have any desire to live there at all. So that’s one of the reasons I left the mountains. I was drafted then, according to my registration in 1944. And, of course, the war was really wrapped up by this time. And I took basic training in Blanding, Florida. It was an infantry replacement training center. So I had my 17 weeks of training, basically combat training. And I was left—I think I left down there— The 16th of December, what we did, we had traveling orders to report to Fort Reed, Maryland, at a certain time. And that time in between, you could go home, usually eight or ten days, something like that. So I did that, went back to Harlan County, Kentucky, and spent the… for 10 days. I think it was the year after Christmas. Some of this has become a little shady. I had to report to Fort Meade, Maryland. So I left the following day and to Fort Meade and me and I discovered thousands and thousands of other troops because I was still not aware of what was going on in Belgium at the time. I’d heard it, but it didn’t have a lot of meaning. So from Fort B, they sent me up to, it was a port of embarkation, I think, around Boston. I don’t remember. I remember they told us, don’t unpack your bags, you’re leaving. So they sent us on an old French luxury liner that I’ll do France.
SPEAKER 05 :
Huh.
SPEAKER 04 :
You were going to ask a question?
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, I think I’ll ask it here in just a minute. We’re just about done with this segment. This is pretty fascinating. I can’t believe, James, that you can remember the detail that you have here, because sometimes I can’t remember what I had for breakfast.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, well… Yeah, well, it’s all very real, and I do remember.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, and what was the name of the boat again? Okay. And so we’ll talk about that when we come back. I’m talking with James Scott. He’s 97 years young. And he was born in Kentucky. And that was a tough childhood. That’s really hard work that you’ve described. I grew up in western Kansas. And, of course, farming had new developments by the time I was growing up. My whole family’s farmers as well. But I know these stories, and I know how much work this is. and people just trying to make sure that they had enough to eat during the Depression. And it really, everybody pitched in. The kids, everybody did, James. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. so what we’re going to go to break before we do that though i wanted to mention the center for american values is located in pueblo on the beautiful riverwalk and it was founded for several reasons one to honor our medal of honor recipients and they do that through over 160 portraits of valor of medal of honor recipients but additionally they are teaching these foundational principles of honor integrity and patriotism through many of their educational programs and also their On Values presentation. So for more information about the center, go to AmericanValuesCenter.org. That’s AmericanValuesCenter.org. And we will be right back with James Scott.
SPEAKER 08 :
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SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you so much for having me. To learn more, reach out to Teresa at 520-631-9243. Teresa would love to talk with you. Again, that number is 520-631-9243.
SPEAKER 09 :
Thank you so much for listening to America’s Veterans Stories. We are rebroadcasting some of the shows that we have recorded in the past because we have these amazing guests and these amazing stories, and we need to hear them. And so we thought that it would be a great idea to rebroadcast some of these so that you can hear our history and know our history because it is so important. So again, this is something that was recorded earlier, and thank you for listening. And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. I’m talking with James Scott. He’s 97 years young and grew up in the mountains of Kentucky and decided that he wanted to… get into the Army, and so he asked his father if he would sign for him to get in because he was 17, and his father didn’t want him to do that. So what he did is he went down to the draft board, and he said he was 18, and next thing you know, he’s in the Army. Is that kind of the way it went, James Scott?
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s the way it was, and I’ve… A couple of times I kind of regretted it during basic training because I had been used to seeing all the newsreels and Army marching, you know, and neat uniforms and everything. Well, those first 17 weeks was not like that at all. But I’ve withstood it okay. I did my share of marching and training. the weapons training and et cetera, et cetera, which my weapons training was consisted of rifle, uh, heavy machine gun and heavy mortar, which was an 81 millimeter. And, uh, we had all the, the regular dry training. And then, then we had, uh, uh, live fire on all of them occasionally along with, uh, hand-to-hand combat we had a whole bunch of that which i guess they didn’t know what we would need but that went along with it so anyway it got me to the poe and i I, along with 12,000 other replacement infantrymen, was on that big ship. And we docked, I think, in Scotland and rode some kind of a train down to one of the ports in England, got an LSTs, crossed the channel in terrible weather in early January. And we still, you know nothing. You don’t know where you’re going or who you’re going to be with. You just, these fellows, you don’t see any of them. So they put us on the train, and over a night and a half a day, we got into where the stowage stuff was, and the train took us into a tunnel, and we unloaded with all our equipment, and we were in Belgium. And remember, this was very cold. The 16th of December, I had left Florida. We didn’t have any additional clothes, the two wool blankets and a big heavy overcoat and zero weather, so… They put us along with so many replacements, everything. They were just poor replacements in there because of the big push the Germans had thrown everything they had at us. Of course, at this time, they’d already pushed back out of Bastogne, but they were still moving up infantry. So I spent about a week there. You never knew where you were or anything, just you’re wandering around. So when I was called out, most of the time, every morning, they would come down and get replacements for the wounded and dead and so forth. So they took out about 500 of us. and put us on a train, and we went the other way. So what happened, I went down to Cherbourg, France, or close by, and they put me in an outfit that I had not heard much about, Special Forces and the Rangers. And what was left over of the Rangers and Special Forces from Italy were encamped there, and all the replacements that had their 17 weeks of infantry training, including the hand-fighting, They rehabbed us, replaced all those, and made one large regiment, which was the 474th Infantry Regiment. We trained for that, for the landing in Norway, for about, I don’t know, maybe until early March, maybe mid-March. which it became obvious that we were not going to have to land in norway so we moved out with all our equipment we had some new tanks and mh and a lot of new stuff went up across the rhine i crossed the rhine at Cologne, the engineers had thrown up a pontoon bridge. I think that’s a bridge that’s floating on tanks or something, steel tanks underneath, but it holds up trucks and all the heavy equipment. And from there, we went on up into central Germany. And our job was, we didn’t go back on the foxhole line, is what I’m trying to say, I guess. But when they would move out, We would move into small towns, or big towns for that matter, and seal it off and inspect it for whatever we could find. Hiding prisoners, hiding servicemen, weapons, ammo. You’d be surprised how much ammo and weapons we found in these little towns. It was, I guess, just abandoned, but that was our job to… to collect all the stuff that was going along that had been out left behind or make sure that there wasn’t any resistance pockets and so forth around. A couple of times we got close enough that we got some artillery on us, so I guess we got too active or too close to a pocket one, and they wanted to let us know that this was not a picnic. Anyway, when the war ended, of course, then in May, Since we had trained to land in Norway, they took our regiment. We went to Norway for the screening of all the prisoners and so forth and that, which turned out to be a very good thing because the Norwegian people really welcomed us. And we’d been used to five months of rubble and broken houses. So when we landed in Oslo, there were things in one piece, you know. And so we processed all the German service people in Norway, and many of the old people had so much… points they’d been in combat. Some of our ranger that was still there had been in North Africa on something and of course southern Italy and the special forces men were too. I was kind of intrigued. You never know where you’re going in so we moved into this tent with some guys and I looked around and he was sitting on his cot and he had this little jump badge on and I said You guys been jumping out of airplanes? Yeah, haven’t you? I said, not me, I’ve never jumped. So it was never a requirement because we were on the ground and I don’t think they did any drops after that. But anyway, that was a little wrinkle, just kind of get broken in. What am I into here, you know? So anyway, the trip to Norway was great. I came back. I didn’t have enough points to come home, so I had to go back to Germany. All the old combat men that had the extra points and stuff, the regiment was taken out, and they were all sent home. Several of us went back to Germany for occupation duty, which… It was quite a good deal. I got the quartermaster outfit and became a mess sergeant, which turned out really nice. So I spent that time until the following June, and they wanted all personnel that had been in combat service to go home, so myself along with two or three other guys there in the company. Well, I just I did want to ask you about some of the men that you came in contact with that had been in North Africa.
SPEAKER 09 :
And Italy, that was very difficult fighting. Did they share any stories about that at all with you?
SPEAKER 04 :
Not a whole lot. The Rangers, we had a few of the Rangers. One of our platoon sergeants was a Ranger of the 2nd Battalion that landed, climbed the rocks at Normandy. And the Special Forces was… It was three battalions of Americans and one of Canadians, and I had never heard of them, and I don’t know if anybody else ever did, but they had trained what special forces do nowadays, hand-to-hand fighting, and anything that went along with it, they had been in Italy also. So, yeah, they didn’t elaborate a whole lot, but… A couple of the Ranger guys, this one sergeant, he’d go wacko once in a while. He’d have nightmares. And he always carried a Tommy gun instead of a rifle. And I know when we got sleeping in barracks after the war ended in huts, He’d have nightmares, and one of the other squad sergeants got up and got his Tommy gun off. He’d hang it on the bed. He said, always get that out because he was afraid he’d get up and go cuckoo, you know, and grab his gun because he would really have nightmares. But another fellow I felt sorry for, I was young, you know. He was real quiet. He was one of the ones in my squad. We were sitting there one night, and he always kind of looked like it was a dream. He turned to me and said, Scotty, what’s it like back in the States? I didn’t think much about it then, but I told him, you know, what was going on. The war was going. People were really cooperating or something. He said, I’ve been here two years, and most of that’s been in combat time. I’ve thought about that since. And I remember the guy’s name was Reinhardt. He was from Iowa. I doubt if he’s still living. He was two or three years older than me. But they didn’t share a lot. Most World War II veterans are pretty silent. For whatever reason, each one probably has their own reason. As any combat veteran would have, they’d have their own reason for staying silent or speaking out. So that took care of that deal. The only time they would share, they did pack up a truckload of us. We were in our tents on the weekend while we were there in training and took us down to Anzio and let us see the beach down there. And it was staggering because along the hills over there were still huge racks of German ammo, 20, 40 millimeter ammo and all that stuff still stacked up that they hadn’t. done away with. I didn’t see the combat, but I saw where the guys had to be. It’s awesome to stand up there and look at a man having to try to get up from the water up to the hedgerow and somebody shoot at him. It’s kind of staggering. So that’s the only thing that we really ever had. They were nice Very nice. The cadre, the non-coms, really looked after us younger men all the time. We learned very quick to depend on them, too, and be there for them when the need was. It was no more do that because I said, just tell me what to do and I’ll be there. So it’s a different life in the military to serve with those combat men.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah, and that’s one of the things I’ve learned, James, is that I don’t think that we can understand combat unless we’ve gone through it. It’s just an experience that combat veterans have a real bond with each other. And it’s a difficult thing, but I am so grateful for all those that have been willing to give their lives and have given their lives for our liberty. The official Marine Memorial is located right here in Colorado in Golden at 6th and Colfax. It was dedicated in 1977, and it is time for a facelift. And the USMC Memorial Foundation is working diligently to raise the funds to make that happen. And a great way that you can honor our military, to say thank you to those people who have put their lives on the line or have given their lives for our freedom, is to support the USMC Memorial Foundation. And you can do that by going to usmcmemorialfoundation.org.
SPEAKER 07 :
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SPEAKER 09 :
Thank you so much for listening to America’s Veterans Stories. We are rebroadcasting some of the shows that we have recorded in the past because we have these amazing guests and these amazing stories, and we need to hear them. And so we thought that it would be a great idea to rebroadcast some of these so that you can hear our history and know our history because it is so important. So again, this is something that was recorded earlier, and thank you for listening.
SPEAKER 03 :
God
SPEAKER 1 :
that I love.
SPEAKER 09 :
And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. I’m talking with James Scott. He’s 97 years young. He grew up in the mountains in Kentucky to a big family, and he decided that he wanted to serve. And even though he was 17 and his father would not sign for him, he went down to the draft board, told him that he was 18, and he said, And he was in the Army, World War II, and ended up doing, during the occupation duty, you were transferred to Norway, correct? Do I have that right, James?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 09 :
Okay. What stories do you remember about the occupation component of your service?
SPEAKER 04 :
The occupation was pretty simple. The trip to Norway, I was going to tell you about that. I had occasion to meet up with an SS trooper. They were dedicated to give their life rather than lose it. And during the course of In Norway, we took the prisoners. They all moved up into one large compound. They were interrogated and examined thoroughly, treated medically if they needed it. And at the end of that, they would be shipped back to Germany and to, I guess, their home places. So I was the guard with one of the prisoners. officers that was interviewing uh one day and we come in and he told me this is an ss trooper okay i’d heard a lot about him so we were in the room and of course i was armed and the interrogation was going along and all of a sudden i detected something was going wrong and this uh prisoner Seemed to think that he was a prisoner and not worthy of being interviewed or something. Could go home and words were passed backwards and forth between him and German. Of course, I didn’t understand. So the lieutenant got up and told him, he said, this fellow thinks he’s still king of the roost, you know. So he said, I’ve got to go over to the office and get some papers. And he I’m going to leave you here with him. If he moves, kill him. Oh, my gosh. Well, you know, I was trained, so I just clicked my safety on one. So to make a long story short, I don’t know what he told that guy, but he told me afterward that I told him, we’re going to send you home. You can go on your feet, or we’ll put you there in a box. Okay. So he was very, what’s the word for it? He was very docile after that. Only answered when he was spoken to and never gave anybody more lip. So I’ve remembered that. And I’ve also thought this lieutenant was a Norwegian lieutenant who’d just come out of four years of occupation. And I’ve often felt, did he want me to kill that guy? And, of course, he didn’t do anything worthy of it. But, anyway, it’s just something I’ve thought about over time, you know, and what happens occasionally.
SPEAKER 09 :
Probably grateful that you didn’t have to act upon that, James.
SPEAKER 04 :
I did not, no. Well, you know, I was trained to do that. And at this time, I was 18, and for a year I hadn’t had any other training. That was part of the job. And to me, he was a prisoner and so forth. So anyway, in October, I shipped back to Germany for occupation duty, which was we fed in the quartermaster depot I was with. We served a year in a row. Actually, I become acting director. sergeant of the mess. We only had eight men and a captain who commanded the depot. We had a whole, I think, maybe 200 civilian employees. And we baked bread in our bakery. We had two master German bakers. We baked bread for 100,000 people a day. Some of those were American military, I think about 40,000, and the other 60 were It was a universal relief program, and they had their drivers and big convoys or trucks that load up once or twice a week with the rations. And that was the last experience I had there. I was shipped home and discharged, actually, on the 4th of July, 1946. So that concluded my military pitch.
SPEAKER 09 :
Okay. And so what happened when you came home? You’re from a big family. Did you have other siblings that served in World War II as well?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. My brother that I told you about, he was… He was overseas. I never knew where he was until the war ended. And I don’t know, through a correspondence home, I ended up in Kassel, Germany. And he was about 30 miles from me. So I talked to our first sergeant one Saturday, told him what it was. And he said, well, you go and see if you can find him. All I ask is to be back here on Monday morning. And it worked out. I hitched a ride. I walked over about half a mile or so to the Autobahn. And a jeep picked me up and dropped me off in the castle in downtown. It was above downtown. I hitchhiked a truck, didn’t notice the bumper stickers, and got it and told him where I was going. He said, that’s my outfit, we’re going right up there. So he took me off, dropped me right off in front of my brother’s barracks, and I was sitting on his bed when he came in from lunch or something. So we had a good time. Christmas together, and I think they had a New Year’s party together or something. But he came home then two or three months before I did. That was the contact we had while we were overseas.
SPEAKER 09 :
Okay. And any other siblings that served?
SPEAKER 04 :
Not in World War II. I had another younger brother that served in the Navy in Korea, so there was the three of us. I was in the military.
SPEAKER 09 :
Okay. And did your younger brother survive his service in Korea?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, he was a Navy man, and he was instrumental in the evacuation of civilians. He was on an LST, and he told me a lot about it. uh the terrible conditions of people was it they had to put them in those lsts were made for trucks and tanks so to fill them up it was like a humongous canister and just put them in there like animals you know you had to do something to get as bit as possible off At a time rather than just a few. But he said that the sanitary conditions were terrible. And that was his experience. But he came over with K2, no problem.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, and what I found, James, that it’s been difficult for me to find Korean War veterans that will talk about it. It’s considered the forgotten war. And, you know, it happened not that long after World War II. But it was very, very difficult. Right.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, absolutely. I had a younger sister buried, a fellow. He was a military man. He volunteered in World War II. He’d come home, and he didn’t like civilian life, so he backed up again while he had his advantage. So he was a tank man, and, of course, he ended up back in Korea again, and he suffered some… some setbacks. He was a tank man. He got his feet frozen, and he lost some of his foot, and he was a heavy smoker, so he had Berger’s disease. I’m not familiar with all this. He ended up losing both legs right below the knees, and of course, he had to Turned him back, checked him out for that time, and he spent the rest. And he’d lost eight of his ten fingers also. He’d had to take those. So they lived down in New Barnesville, Texas, and he and my sister both are gone now. He was a very heavy smoker, and I understand that contributes a great deal to Berger’s disease. You just… your body gets injured somewhere and it just rocks away i’m not sure how it all works but anyway that’s the family’s experience with the uh
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, with the Korean War, and yes, the temperatures were so, so cold, and frostbite and frozen extremities was certainly—that did occur. And again, I think, James, we take for granted this wonderful liberty that we have here in America, and I think we need to stop and reflect at just— what has been given in the case of your brother-in-law so that we can live in liberty. And I really appreciate our military, you, our military service. And so thank you for that. We’re going to go to break. And a sponsor that I greatly appreciate for America’s Veterans Stories is Hooters Restaurants. They have locations in Loveland, Westminster, and in Aurora on Parker Road. And great specials Monday through Friday for lunch. And for happy hour, great place to get together with your friends to watch the sporting events and just have some great food. In particular, their fish and chips and their nachos are delicious. I hear that their fish tacos are quite good as well. So again, thank you to Hooters Restaurants for their sponsorship of the show. And so we’re going to go to break. We’ll be right back with James Scott.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you so much for having me. To learn more, reach out to Teresa at 520-631-9243. Teresa would love to talk with you. Again, that number is 520-631-9243.
SPEAKER 09 :
Thank you so much for listening to America’s Veterans Stories. We are rebroadcasting some of the shows that we have recorded in the past because we have these amazing guests and these amazing stories, and we need to hear them. And so we thought that it would be a great idea to rebroadcast some of these so that you can hear our history and know our history because it is so important. So again, this is something that was recorded earlier, and thank you for listening. And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And I’m very excited to be talking with James Scott. He’s 97 years young, World War II veteran. We have learned about his childhood growing up in the mountains of Kentucky, of eastern Kentucky, and then his service during World War II. So James Scott, after the war, you said you came home in July of 1946. What happens next to James Scott?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, you know, not a whole lot for a while. It took a while to get myself recalibrated, but I hung around somewhat and spent my mustering out pay. I had worked briefly in the coal mines, lied about my age before I went in service, and I was back in the coal industry. company again down in the mountains, and they were paying pretty good wages, so I got me a job in the mines and worked about another month or so in low coal. That’s 42 inches of coal, two and a half miles underground, and dating a girl that had marriage on her mind, and I certainly didn’t have him have any thoughts along that line and i don’t this coal mine business for the birds so i left again and came back to cincinnati and fiddle around actually i met my wife through a friend cousin that lived here i’m looking for some phone numbers and he gave me two or three and i called her and Make a long story short, she was a beautician. I picked her up that night at the beauty shop, and I guess we went and had supper somewhere together. I don’t remember. But we dated off and on in 1949. We got married, and right away, she got pregnant. We had a bouncy little baby boy in the 50s, and that kind of took care of that deal, and And I, of course, went to work in factories. I was doing whatever they had to do. And the Ford Motor Company had just opened a plant here in Cincinnati, and I got a job with them. I was working in various machine-type work, but I was never happy with it. I wanted something a little better. So I had a chance to leave that company and go with a small company as a trainee to a die maker, which is a four-year process for an apprenticeship, you know. And we’ll kind of bridge this somewhat, but I realized I needed some more education. So I talked with the director of engineering, who was also connected with the College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. And I ended up with a… correspondence company which today would be an odd line but it was correspondence course and he and I laid out a plans for a study for the four-year high school with engineering background so I went for that and fortunately I had enough stay with it I guess you would call it that I finally finished it took me about five or six years but it was quite heavy in math and had to have all the other stuff that goes with it so I didn’t know when I finished the four years of the trainee program the plant manager come down and asked me if he wanted to interview me up in the office and I thought well maybe he’s going to kick me out But they had an opening in the engineering department for model building and technician, and they would like me to do it. We talked about it a little bit and talked about the money, and I ended up going to the engineering department. Well, I spent the next 30 years, and I completed… When I finally completed high school, I tied up night training at the University of Cincinnati for quality control and engineering statistics. I didn’t get very far in several hours, but I was getting older, time was going on, and I was settled down very well. I didn’t take any additional classes, but I spent the time there and ended up actually basically the technical part of the engineering department. the person to go through. So I built some models of electro-mechanical circuit breakers, what I was in, with some other technical stuff, and spent several years remodeling and rehabbing and building a new line of circuit breakers. And the company was small, so it sold out to a company in California. They closed down, and the president of the company asked if I’d stay in and clean out, help clean out the engineering department. So I did, which took quite a bit of cleaning out. We had blueprints going back to 1918. Oh, wow. I worked with a company representative from California in getting all the products out, the materials. patents and so forth so then when we got that pretty well out the people from California asked if I would go out and help them set it all back together again I made a deal with them my wife go with me oh yeah yeah sure so she was she was okay with that so we went out there and we’re out in California James please
SPEAKER 09 :
Where at?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, Anaheim. Oh, Anaheim, okay. They had a place for me. They told me we’ve got you a nice place, which was Newport Beach. I didn’t realize that was a Blue Blood. division i made the mistake of telling the lady it was a key to block community big big apartment complex with everything swimming pools walking trails and i made the mistake of referring to a big shopping area up at the hill as the shopping center and she said that’s not a shopping center that’s fashion fair i said okay But anyway, I helped them work with their plant manager and separated all their active products out and had it set back up. It was running in about a month and a half. They had the ladies doing the small work assemblies. Mexican ladies who were very intelligent and very cooperative, you know. And I come home, they offered me a job, but at this time I was… About 63 and a half. And I thought, man, I would have to, well, they told me, they said, you’ll have to move out here. Find you a place. And I thought, that’s not a thing at this age to try to relocate and sell the place back in Kentucky or leave it empty. So I came home and retired. And that has been the… 33 years ago, I guess now. But what I wanted to tell you, after I got married, my family’s all from the old Baptist families. I had never made a profession of faith, but I had talked to a couple of friends. One evening, it’s kind of weird, and… I went to bed that night and I thought, well, you know, I don’t know. I would like to do something. So I didn’t have any great prayers. I didn’t have any fire aches, visions or thunder from the mountains. And I just I told the Lord, I’ll just give it to you, whatever I need to do. You helped me do it because I knew I had this little chubby boy that I had to raise. And I can’t explain what type of feeling I had, but there was something come over me that’s still there. And the action of God’s Holy Spirit, I think. took back my word and that’s for a bit i’ve been active in christian circles ever since ordained deacon since 1954 and uh worked with youth and other people i just wanted to get that in as a witness to what can be done and the lord has blessed every move i’ve made i i had uh Low income most of my life, but actually after I retired I got into some investing and I’ve done very well with that. And I just think the Lord has blessed me in that realm too. So that kind of puts my life up to right now in a shell and gives you about everything I’ve gone through more or less.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, James, thank you for sharing your story about your faith, because I think that there is a revival of people seeking relationship with Christ. I think people look at what’s happening in our society, and we realize that we need to reclaim our faith in Christ. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. How long were you married? Other children that you had as well?
SPEAKER 04 :
I only had one son. My wife could not have children. We were married 64 and a half years when she died. My wife was eight years older than me, and I think the marriage was rather skeptical amongst both families, but it lasted longer than anyone else’s did.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, that’s awesome.
SPEAKER 04 :
We had a good life. She was a Christian going into the thing, and I think the Lord led me that way, too. So I… I live by myself. I have. It’s been a little past 10 years, and I’ve been able to live by myself and get by. I have some wonderful friends around, neighbors in the neighborhood and friends at church that kind of watch after me. And I’ve had an interesting life, and I Just a word about our country. I know it’s got problems, but there is so much. There’s no country in the world that have what we have, and we can’t afford to lose it. And oddly, there are people that don’t care. Some of our own citizens, they don’t know or just simply don’t care. unless they have their own way and their own say. And that’s unfortunate. We’re Americans. Had we been otherwise in World War II, we’d all be speaking German today. It’s not. I got to go on the trip to Washington. My son went with me. The honor flight and put cream on the whole thing. I was one of four of us that they picked out to during the ceremony at the unknown at the tomb to lay the wreath on the tomb. But that has been more to me because to me it represented every veteran that is dead. I was their representative there for a minute with that wreath. That’s what I still feel that way. It’s something anybody could do, but to be chosen, it was just icing on the cake, I think.
SPEAKER 09 :
My gosh. Well, James Scott, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. And my friends, as we hear these stories, we realize that indeed we do stand on the shoulders of giants. So God bless you, James Scott. God bless you, my listeners, and God bless America.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m. here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.
SPEAKER 02 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
