“Well the one thing with this letter here also, the whole page is about food. That’s the only thing you were living for, you know. I remember my father saying, looking at a poster in the bakery, 'that’s what bread used to look like.' That was…

“I weighed 135 pounds when I was captured, and when I was released from prison I weighed 87 pounds. Just a bag of bones covered with skin.”

“If you were not in the mines, you would take and unload coal off the ships onto railroad cars. We would work every morning about 4:00 am and you did not know where you were going to be, whether in the mine or on the ship or where. Then the next day…

"And then they went off to Illinois to see Uncle Julius as well. And they lived there for a while. They were living in this small town in Illinois. And they were just so excited to be with family again. Uncle Julius was a wonderful man, and his…

"Then [Ruth and Hildegard] went through Vermont, and they got all the stamps-- they had all of the immigration papers. Then they eventually went to New York where my Aunt Edie was living temporarily, because she had met my Uncle Ruby who was a…

"Well, when they [Ruth and Hildegard] graduated from school, they were assigned to becoming apprentices in various businesses, and Harrogate was a very popular location for tourists. They had spas and very fancy salons there. So my aunt became very…

“August 1945. We drop anchor in Tokyo Bay, begin unloading equipment, and send the troops ashore in attack waves. A few weeks ago the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and just a few days ago the Emperor Hirohito went on…

“After twenty-two months in the South Pacific, I was sent back to the United States and given twenty days leave so I could visit with my wife and my first-born son, Herman Eugene Talmadge, Jr., whom I had not seen. When that leave was up I was…

“V-E Day was the day that Germany signed the armistice. I was in Reims, France. Reims, France was right next door to Lucky Strike and I was in Reims that day, that night when the armistice was signed and bedlam, bedlam. Edna was in London when the…

“We were flying toward a target and I was leading the top element. Remember that’s three airplanes and I wasn’t being real close to the formation because we were not close to the target yet. And all of a sudden we heard the radio band it’s twelve…