Stories by author "Hillard Pouncy": 12
Stories
Grandson's Graduation
"Yes, I went there…and…he did graduate, and I was there. My wife wasn’t there, she had passed away, but I sat there during that graduation and…I think I was kind of transfixed because my grandson was graduating from one of the best schools in…
Retirement to Georgia
"I had a wife. Her name was Mattie. I met her in college. We stayed married a long time. She passed away about 4 or 5 years ago. She was a teacher. She taught elementary school. She also taught special education, now, if you have any…
Working in Saudi Arabia
"And in the Middle East, they came to our place, came to our laboratory, and we talked to them and tell them what we were doing…and someone in the Middle East bought a license from Union Carbide. And they found out that they really didn’t know…
Working for Union Carbide
"I went to work for a company called Union Carbide. This company had a division called the Visking Division, and this division would make skins for skinless wieners. There was a man who noticed that America was buying more and more hot dogs. …
PhD at Syracuse University
"Now, after the war’s over, and wars have a way of ending, I came back to school, and I went to graduate school at T—at Syracuse, Syracuse University. And I flew with the New York Air National Guard as a radar observer, and that was a…
Navigation School
"Our group, B-25, was supposed to go in the Pacific, and we were supposed to fly a mission from some island near…Japan onto Japan to the Japan mainland, that’s what we were supposed to do. And this thing got so bad, so very bad, that the…
Bombardier School
"Were there dangers? Flying is risky. It’s always risky. We had a saying that…there were old pilots and there were bold pilots, so you have to be careful. They says, there were never any old, bold pilots. If you’re too bold, you never get…
Becoming a Tuskegee Airman
"I just about knew it was gonna happen. I was the right age. I was about…18, 19 at that time, and…I felt I was gonna go. I did learn, however, that if you volunteer, sometime you can pick the service that you want, and when I got to…
Enrolling at Tuskegee
"After high school in Henry County, I learned the Tuskegee would offer people jobs. They would give ’em work scholarships, and if you would come to Tuskegee and wan—and you were willing to work, you could just about work your way through…
High School Education
"We didn’t have a high school, we had tenth grade, and when you finished the tenth grade, that was the end of the line. Now the other school system across town where I couldn’t go, of course they had high school. So at the end of tenth grade,…