Why don't you begin by introducing yourself?

Wait, wait, wait a second.

When, when we're rolling here, give us a second.

Okay.

All right.

I'm Willard Gaeddert, from Fredonia, New York, which is in Chautauqua County, the lat-, western most county in the Southern Tier. I've lived there since 1962, and a part of the physics there for twenty years before I retired. Part of that time, I was in charge of the graduate program, and I enjoyed working with the graduate students, both as counselor, keeper of the records, and whatever else came to our, our attention. And I enjoyed that very much because I was dealing with mature adults and I felt it was my job to help them do what they wanted to do. And since I'd been on the campus a goodly number of years, all the doors were open to me since I'd worked in Faculty Governance, in AAUP, and other activities with students and faculty on the campus.

What, what is the campus?

This is one of the, the campus is one of the units in the State University system of New York state.

So, it's SUNY.

So it's SUNY college at Fredonia. And you remember it was changed from a teacher's college to a liberal arts college in 1958, and has become one of the, in my biased view, one of the better colleges in the State University system.

Tell us a little bit about your World War II experience. You know what we need to do is take that little tag sticking out of your shirt there, just so that, is that OK?

I, I, no, no I don't even get that.

See it? Oh, but now close...oh, you're not getting it, you're not getting it.

No, it's, it'll be all right.

OK.

So, my World War II experiences were quite varied. I was deferred for a couple of years because of my work in physics, graduate work in teaching, and so I wasn't drafted until November of 1944, which was quite late in the season of World War II. And what happened was that I was, had a graduate assistantship at University of Buffalo where I got a master's and then a graduate assistantship at University of Oklahoma to teach and do graduate work. And in my classes were people from the army who had been taken out of their units and placed into the university for refresher in physics and other courses, and so almost all of the students were army service people. And that was difficult. It was very hot, fifty men to a room that should hold no more than thirty, and I could feel the heat from these men coming to me towards the summer when it was very hot in Norman, Oklahoma. A couple of days, well, at one time the general came to them and, and said, you guys are doing a fine piece of work, and then a couple of days later they were all pulled back to their units. They were pretty bitter about it because, after a year and a half the fellow, their comrades had been advanced and they were put back in their units at the same place they had left. At the same time, there were nine graduate assistants in the Physics Department, and all of their deferments were dropped. Four of us were from Mennonite background and were COs, and at the same time, recruiters from Army Ordnance and the Clinton Works, which is Oak Ridge, Tennessee came around and other places were available to us, and I could have doubled my salary and stayed out of the draft. Instead I said, decided that if the army was that much interested, I wasn't. And one of my friends went to the Clinton Works in Oak Ridge, and he said, the first week he said, Willard could, could work here. The second week he said, Willard couldn't work here. What I did was then worked for a, an oil company on a magnetometer survey in West Texas, and it was hot that summer, 110 in the shade, and I was out in the sun and got a sunburn under a white shirt, so that gives you a little bit of an idea. But then, I was drafted, and had a bus ride from Shamrock, Texas in the panhandle to Fresno, California, and then a crew truck took me from Fresno to North Fork, California, which is some place between Fresno and Yosemite up in the hills. And our job was to work with, for the Forest Service. And I was at a side camp, and we were clearing the, the trails and also the fire trails, and the roads, and primarily what we were doing was chopping out some, some fire, fire brush, and some of it was poison oak, and some of us got in the smoke and we were back in main, main camp because of the poisoning. Well, from there I went to Camp Camino for a couple of weeks for a training, then to [airplane overhead] another training camp in Colorado Springs, and then was assigned by the Mennonite Central Committee to, as a side camp leader for the smoke jumpers out at McCall, Idaho.

This plane is pretty loud. Could...

[coughs]

...a bad experience both in the camp yourself—

Yeah.

—and also being mentored by—one thing we really want to look at is how people were influenced to make the decision to become conscientious objectors, and you told the story about your uncles—

Yeah.

—in World War I—

Right.

—and then you talked about counseling. You were a physics professor there—

Yes.

—is that right?

Yes.

—but when you talked about counseling, were you talking about draft counseling, or, or—

Yes.

—sort of spiritually counseling people? If you could talk about that, because I'm sorry, we're really running late and we need to kind of—

OK, well let me—

—try to focus on the things—

All right.

—that are critical—

Fine.

And I think that's really important in your story, is how you were influenced by your uncles and how you influenced—

Well let me, let me finish—

—finish that and then go onto that.

Right. And what I did was then, with the—I was at McCall, Idaho, with thirty-two jumpers, two cooks, and myself, and then during the winter we were transferred to Haugan, Montana, and then I was camp director at Fort Collins, where my wife was carrying our eldest, was a camp matron, the camp dietician, and part of the time the camp nurse. And she felt that the farm boys from Iowa, and Oklahoma, and Kansas ought to be introduced to salads, rather than just meat and potatoes, but that was a difficult sell. From there I went directly to teaching at University of Nebraska, and was on that campus for nine years, and then taught at other places and landed up in Fredonia years later. Part of the influence that, that drove me to this is that I felt that I was being faithful to my own background. There were many factors in this: my reverence for my grandparents, particularly in my grandmother Gaeddert, and other people who were, whom I admired and felt close to. My parents provided the support, and our family gatherings were filled with anecdotes and conversations about the past, the present, their relationships with each other, and never did I hear an argument among them. That was just not done. I mean, you didn't demean any member of the family. And, as I me-, as you may have heard, there were thirteen siblings in the family that I—the—my father was a member of a family with thirteen siblings, so it was a large family. But I had the support. And then there were stories that I had heard from Uncle John and his brother Abe, who was a tri-, twin brother to Uncle Henry, so there were two sibling twins in that family of the thirteen. Anyhow, Abe and John were in the military at, in Kansas at, and they decided not to carry a gun or train with a gun—

And this was during World War I?

This is during World War I. What they did then was to, simply refused. And they were lined up on the ground, lying face down, side by side, the head, their heads in the same, in the same line, and an old army truck—at that time they had hard rubber tired wheels—roared towards them from a distance, and Uncle John thought, well, this is it. Those who wanted to carry a gun or changed their mind, they would stand up and they would be out of the line of the truck. But, I don't know how many, but at least he didn't stand up and neither did Uncle Abe. So at the last instant, the truck swerved and roared by them so that the back wheel just grazed their heads. That was the story that I got from, from Uncle John, and it impressed me. I've heard other stories, but this was one that, that lead me. And I grew up in the Mennonite church with the notion of discipleship and follower of Christ. Well, I was baptized and then later on, the baptism was just a sprinkling of water, it didn't mean much, but being a counselor at a camp for younger high wi-, high school students, sat on a rock in the hot Kansas sun, and decided which side I was gonna be on. And from that moment forward I've tried to be fairly consistent with that decision. And so my action to go into Civilian Public Service was consistent with it. And I told the story of this a little bit earlier that when I was back on furlough for a few days with my family in Newton, my grandmother was living with them an-, for whom I had a tremendous amount of respect and love, and she gave me a ten dollar bill. I knew how meager her income was, and she was in her late eighties at the time, and I demurred taking it. And she said to me, you take it, you're witnessing for me. And this was a tremendous emotional, not a burden, but a, but a challenge, and this is many years ago now, but it's still with me.

How did you pass that on?

Well, I don't know. My, my wife and I reared our children in this kind of an atmosphere. There were four children: a boy and a girl, and a boy and a girl, and...we—after we had joined the, helped form the Quaker group in Fredonia, we—Laura was part of the First Day School for the children in the, in the meeting and, along with one of the other mothers, and they, this is what they did was to help them with the materials that were available to inculcate some of these values into the kids. Daughter is—well, the eldest son took Alternative Service at, at Norristown, and since he was fairly, fairly bulky, he was put in the violent ward, and he survived that in good shape. The daughter, who was in public school teaching for many, many years, told me once, Dad, you know, that Quaker stuff works. And, so that—and the son, second son is a gentle person who is, who, who is, went into social psychology and is teaching psychology at one of the state units. And the youngest daughter was very strong, and she was on a mission from London to Namibia to bring some book and reading materials to the SWAPO forces during the time that they were still nonviolent. The mission was not well supported by the group in, in London, and the sailing vessel had all kinds of mishaps on the Western coast of Africa. She was, they were, there were many untoward difficulties. The trip was finally laid down in Libreville in Gabon, and then the State Department, which was very, very helpful, the emergency department of the State Department was very helpful in trying to maintain some relationship with her because they had good relations in Gabon, but the, since their visas were no good when they were off the ve—