"My mother said, 'I know this wonderful, wonderful school, and the girls all have all these toys to play with and each other, and nobody’s ever lonesome, and there's a big bedroom, and there’ll be thirty beds up there, and there’ll be…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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,…

"Well, I went to Raleigh, and they interviewed me. And then I got a job. And I went to Washington and I took the exam until I was too dumb to learn. But they thought I was smart. And they put me out to work. And I did like math problems. My…

"Well, my daddy helped the math teacher in high school, because he did not know math. He was a smart man but didn't know math. And he'd tell my brother, 'take this home and get your daddy to work it and bring it back in the…