“Steering a city through troublesome times is just like piloting a ship through stormy waters. You don’t know what you are going to run into but you are going to be ready for anything. You may have to go through obstacles instead of around them. Or…

“I was happy as I could be or dumb and happy shall we say until I saw the first flight coming up. Our mission was to hit the V-1 bombs. They looked like ski jumps, so we called them ski jumps. They were on the coast of France... So our first mission…

“It was on Sunday morning and I was getting ready to go to church and we heard on the radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Now I was 20 years old at that point in time and I knew that I was going to go into the military because I knew…

“Gunfire never destroyed an idea and by the same token, the searing heat of an atomic bomb will not obliterate the philosophy of communism. Only a better philosophy of life, that which comes from the minds and hearts of free men, can ever…

“I figured it all out, and took them along for two reasons: First, I figured that with all those big Air Force people aboard, the pilot would be very careful when we got up in the sky. And second, I wanted to make sure that if the plane did come…

"And then my husband got laid off from Lockheed so many times, and he was in the Air National Guard, so they had an opening there, so he joined the Air National Guard, and then he retired from there. He traveled a lot when he was at…

"Well the government required you to put up any material that would block light being emitted from windows to aid German bombers. But although the war started on 3 September ’39 the bombing didn’t start until June of 1940. Although Hitler…

"Finally we went out to the aviation field, where a Civil Aeronautics unit for the teaching of colored pilots is in full swing. They have advanced training here, and some of the students went up and did acrobatic flying for us. These boys are…

"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…