Oh, I thought he said—

That's why I said roll the take.

Oh.

Well...

Why don't we start by rolling the take?

That's true.

OK.

OK?

Thank you.

OK. So, just start by introducing yourself.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Fereuza Gifford. I am originally from Massachussetts—in other words, as they call us, Yankees. However, California, where I am speaking from, is my adopted and beloved state.

Tell—

Hold on one second.

—will you talk a little bit about—

—she looks awful cute, but we're not gonna put her in.

[laughs]

Well...

OK. So, what, what happened to you during World War II?

Well, World War II is a very particular time that we, as citizens of America, was pulling ourselves out of a Depression, which formed from the fall of our stock markets, as everybody knows. Therefore, I was married at the time to John Joseph Piontkowski Jr. And, my husband worked in a loft, a leather loft, and, the owner—there were, was two owners, one died and, and the other one committed suicide, and that put 500 people out of work, so we, [laughs] my husband worked on the WPA. We had one child. After married a year, a child was born, by the name of Patricia Piontkowski, very beautiful little girl. She was born in the house. Well, why did I not go to the hospital? Because I heard they were getting careless and getting the babies mixed up. So as a very young mother I said, I'm having my baby right in home, so's that I know what I have. And that's, was that. Life went on, just like what's happening now, with the exception that we were being involved in a war. There was no doubt about it. The last exciting thing that happened before the war was the Lindbergh boom, when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, after six before him failed. He, made it.

Mm-hmm.

And of course, we listened to our radios, we didn't have television. Oh, and news of things didn't get around, so we lived the way our parents lived before us. The world was not as small then as what it is now. And then our marriage was not going too well. I won't go into that, because that's private life. But, we did make a, serious decision. We decide, he said, can I go into the Army? I wanna go fight the Japanese. And I said, well, I'm not happy the way I am, you wanna give me a divorce? I'll sign my signature and you can go in the Army. So, so it was done. We, peacefully, I went my way, he went his way. And, so then I found myself with my little girl. And, we were going to get back together again, but my mother-in-law, being Polish, did not like her son marrying people that was not Polish. Therefore they were very happy [laughs]. She grabbed the, the Frigidaire the day after my husband left for the Army. And by golly, I took a cop, went down, and grabbed it back again. But eventually I left the town of Danvers, because my gut feeling was, they're going to beat me, there's more of them against me. So I left.

You, you talked about how the more—

Now I decided I'd better serve, as long as I can't get in the Army, I'll serve the war the best I know how. So what I did was I went to Lynn, Massachusetts, and, I asked to, if I, I—oh, I had a course in American Can, which was machine shop inspection course. And a, young lady being a machine shop inspector against the journeymen, that didn't do at all. Women, were having a hard time getting into the working, but the men were all gone, so they didn't have any other choice but to take the women. So, they made up three people, I think it was Helen, Mary, and Jenny—my name was Jenny at that time, and I had remarried, a Robishaw, so it was Jenny Robishaw. And, they made a very, very special thing. We were the, we worked on a development team—and that wasn't just an ordinary development team—on the Air Force, item. We worked on the Dr. Moss turbo supercharger, which fits into the B-52s and -54s. And at the same time, was coming into view the jet propelled. So we ran bucket wheels to their destruction, we ran impeller blades to their destruction, whereby, the engineering department could tell at what, speed the viscosity of the metal stretched, broke, or otherwise. And we were very deeply involved with that; and also an assistant in taking pictures of visual air vane flows; not to mention running speed—a steam operation with Venturi pipes, and we had to go to school for that, inside of General Electric. I was very proud to work for General Electric, because the Defense Program, to this day thinks that GE is the hot, pajamas. Now, I had married, as I told you, and, dummy I was, the man was a drinker, and I said, oh my lord, if they ever catch this man drunk with my little girl with me, they're gonna take my little girl away from me. Every time my mother-in-law and father-in-law—

Let—

—they'd—

—let me—

So, we decided to go to Vallejo, California, and—

—let me just—

—serve Navy—

—tell me, tell me, this—

I left.

Yeah. But what I, what I wanted to know was, what you said the other day, you, talked to us about how the war provided economic opportunity for people who hadn't really had that opportunity before. Could you tell us that briefly?

Yes, that is true. Because in the older days, they had pension system, and people hung on to their jobs, they hung on to their jobs, they didn't leave their jobs. And if they're not gonna leave their jobs, you're not gonna get in. And, what happened was, the, the necessity of providing a war with the items that are necessary for war gave jobs to many people that otherwise would not have any job at all. And, that means that ladies were hired by, the shipping, what do you call—

Yards?

—these yards—shipyards—

Shipyards, mm-hmm.

—and, machine shops, and, they did all sorts of things. So, women were pulled into, they worked for Lockheed, they worked for the airplane plants, they worked for everything.

Mm-hmm.

So eventually, that was really the opening for women labor. You must realize that women wasn't even, avowed—allowed to vote till the Twenties, and this is only the Thirties, so, going into the Forties, and I am referring to '41 and '42.

Talk a little about that. What's your recollection of Pearl Harbor, and the day that, that Pearl Harbor was bombed?

Hmm.

One second.

Well—

One second. Would you, you know, I'm a little worried about this. [enters frame, adjusts object off-screen] It looks like it's slipping, let me just sort that out a little bit, excuse me.

—a, a push in the government. You'd see signs everywhere—

She needs to start over.

—Uncle Sam—

You need to start—

—wants you—

—that again, you need to start that again, we were, we weren't rolling.

Oh.

Are you on, now?

Yes, now it's on.

Yeah, go ahead. Say it again.

Well, I was encouraged, while I was working on the—

Lady, just, say that again, there was a big push in the government.

There was a big push in the government to bring people out of private work into government projects. And, they made a campaign all over the place, and they also had campaigns for selling bonds for you to put your money into government bonds. And the, the campaign was, I don't now, it was everywhere's. And, so I said, well, I'd better serve the Navy if I can work for the Navy, because then I, I, I have my child. So I applied for, out of, I was, I was, recruited out of Boston—

—wonderful husband, we, married many, many, many years.

Oh, that's great.

OK, we're ready to—

OK, so—

—go back—

—to get back to conscientious objection. What did—

You're on, Sam?

—you think about that?

Well, we did, I did, see a lot. There were as many objectors that—the objectors were the minority, the, and they objected for some reason or other. And most of the objectors I noticed seemed to be, without conceding, college-age persons, college-age persons that was in college, maybe they wanted to stay in and finish law, so why should they go into a war; or they wanted to become doctors, why should they go into the war; or they didn't like what we was fighting for, why should we, they go into the war? And they had so many reasons that you'd go crazy if you tried to catch up with all of what they thought about. But as far as I was concerned, I felt that you love your country, and you die for your country. Now, I'm a Yankee, I was born up where, "one if by land, and two if by sea, and I on the," you "on the opposite shore" shall be. Yes, so I am, I'm faithful to my country, and I had no reason to object. But there were objectors...

Did you see it as a class thing? Did you see it as a class thing? The way you describe the objectors, was it something that was—

The, the classification of the, objectors, to me—I don't know why they did object, because married men were not conscript to go into the war, because they had children, if they were married before we got into the war. So they had no beef, you wouldn't see them in it. But the young people, you saw them in it and—

What—

—they were, they were—and now, in the other hand, everybody was so poor getting out of the Depression that, that some of the fellas were glad to get in the Army, because they had better care than they did in, in the Depression, Depression wages. Now, when I worked, which, I did work, I was getting thirty-five cents an hour, which wasn't very much in—before the, at the time the war was starting, before Pearl Harbor. But, I, I was getting the state wages—dollar-something, or, I don't know what it was—when I was on the Dr. Moss, but I was very faithful to what I did.

Lady—look at Judy when you answer me, but, when you—

Mm.

—when you saw these kids, these mostly college kids—

Who would be—

—who didn't want to fight...

Yes?

What did you think of them? Were they not patriotic? Why, did you feel people should, should serve their country, and what do you think of them for not serving their country?

Well, because of the, the Constitution of the United States, the freedom of, of what you thought, and what you wanted to do took priority over anything else. And if you objected to go, you had a reason why, because a lot of people who did not want to bear arms, some for religious reasons, they didn't want to—and, and, I was so busy raising my child as a, as a mother, I had all my training before I was married, and I was taught in the school that you, you give your heart and your love to your country. So, whatever the other people wanted to do, I did not go against them, nor, neither did I participate in, in their doings. I did what I thought was right, because it was my country. But not everybody felt like that. Remember, I was married to a national, who was not a citizen, but a national of this country, where our flag flew over his country.

Hmm. Did you, when people, talk about World War II as, the good war, what, how does that sit with you? Was it—

Ma'am?

When, people refer to World War II as, the good war, how does that feel to you? Is that, did it feel like a good war? Does it now, looking back, seem like a good war?

Well, you know, when you look back to a war, it's like a scratch on your hand, it kind of disappears after a while, and the, all the little things about it that was so important in those days, is like a dream. You say, gee, did I think like that then? Because so many things you get involved in, as time goes by and things change, you sorta set those on your back burner. But, I was very concerned, but I noticed the older you get, the more concerned you become, and that begins when you are of college-age.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So you were concerned... about your safety, about the country, about the outcome of the war? What, what was the concern?

Well, science was my, was my, science was my subject. I loved science, and I knew that our continent is how many miles from, any other continents, and South America isn't interested to come up to bother us, and Canada, we've already had it with England in the 1700s, and France, we bought their land from them. Therefore, they have no reason to come back at us. But the Holocaust—there were two very bad things. Japanese were, were, were, were killing people left and right, and the German, Germany was killing people left and right, so itáyou're in a quandary like this, where am I gonna go? I have to something, gee whiz. And then those that had, didn't have their mind, and that was just figuring out how they're gonna stay out of it to finish whatever they wanted. That's the only way I can look at that.

So, at the time, did you, do you feel like, at the time, you felt like you did your part, and you wanted to do your part, and—

I wanted to do more. I wanted to join. When my child became of age and I went down to sign up in—I was too old, thirty-five.

You, so would you say that, I think you said it before we started taping that you wanted to be in the Army—

I wanted to join the Army so bad.

Say that—

Say that again, I stepped on your line. Say it again.

I wanted to join the Army, so bad. I waited eighteen years to join it. I had to wait till I was seventy-four to get into, any kinda service, and—but I did. I can say I served my country. And I did it on military sea command ship, never knowing I'd even hang into this world this long.

Just briefly say what your service was. At seventy-four, what did you do?

At seventy-four, I was, OS, Ordinary Seaman, and my ship was the United States Navy ship Harkness. And when that came back from a vacation—it was in dry dock in Singapore. And the Merchant Marines did not like to go into this war, because they had been cut off in the Ruling of 1946. Very few. So—

I just need—

—we women went in.

But very briefly, you served in what war, and what did you do in it?

Desert Storm, Desert Shield. And I served as an OS—Ordinary Seaman. I had to pull the lines along with my colleagues, I had to [pause] repair shackles, I had to paint. In fact, the port side of our ship, I had to, was so black from the smoke coming from, I had to breathe, the smoke for five-and-a-half months, every day, because the OS—and there's only two of us on any, military sea command—we have a seven day, hour day, eight, eight hours on the deck, and I had to breathe that. And I was the burner of the documents, because the trasher failed to crush them, so why are they going to shred them if, if the crasher isn't going to crush them? [laughs] So...

Do you have more questions?

Yeah—

Yeah.

I think, one last question...

Yes. So I was, I finally was, remembered by the Navy—

What—

—with a Navy citation.

—I, I know maybe it's a tough question, and requires that you have the wisdom of the seers, but you, you served your country in World War II, you served in Desert Storm, and—

Born in—

—the question is, do people ever learn anything from that, or are, are wars always going to be with us?

[pause] That's a very good question. War has been with this world since the beginning of this world. There's always been warring, war may, may cease, but it's never eradicated, because when it stops in one place, there are problems in another place. And mankind, unwittingly becomes inhumane to mankind, and when mankind becomes inhumane to mankind, the mankind left that is humane does try to step in, and try to do something about it.

Did we—

As I have observed.

Did we do that in World War II? Is that what happened in World War II?

I do believe so, of course. But I believe our, our owning the Philippines as a possession, was one reason why Japan went to war with us, because they have an expanding population. And this is what has happened. In the Philippines, the Japanese business people of the bazaar, I was told from very good sources, they owned big businesses there, but as soon as World War II started, those same owners became captains, majors, and they showed the Japanese navy. So they were in to take the place, but at, but at the expense of the people living there, which was not right.

That's it?

Yeah.

I think—

Could we, can you explain—

—yeah—

Well, I think that at this particular time of interview, our whole country is facing now a third possible problem, and the same thing is happening in the Balkans, because all wars—most wars, not all, but most wars began in the Balkans. And the United States, having joined with other countries is now in a very, very, hard situation—shall they go in at, at the expense of our people's lives, to save lives? What is it worth, to lose a life to save another life? And the value that's going to be, weighed justly is the biggest thing that's facing us at this very moment. And I hope that, we will have some sort of a peaceful solution somewhere's. And we do have our conscientious, objectors, now, as you can see, that—the same thing is happening now that happened in World War, I. So you don't have to look back at World War I, because history repeats itself.

Thank you.

Good.