1 10 1 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/08676a13c699f90052eba31018af8c08.pdf?Expires=1779321600&Signature=K9KYen1A1tgHe3IqM%7EVCbsoBVkfhdhoIBNHBkoPWOSQ%7ELLvSFK26nSXPJLFGjw0NF5UiLyenQFk477XrRpTOX9kU1ZYK%7En5GZrFhhzqS6ZPaDxSdpyER%7E7rjtlITNpdTyiYHdj7WIzcydjHssGdFJM4Klz8GVrzd3l3iXaHLUWDs-2QVqKOqBtTz4HO08wTOFmQfA8q43dWdWTcxsURDkcJjWTvUatpruoY6DGSMFItLcV7ALuHsJSJMCjM0xd60VswtWlnL48HySf1MKndHb4bjAU9aqifqAi6YP5Hty6bIAc54UImDfVfXUgxzCd4tQgPBmPPfwHUGiT%7EbkOi1fw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 987da4415129fc827029bd4ace361b51 PDF Text Text TRANSCRIPT – LEROY H. BAKER Interviewee: Leroy H. Baker Interviewer: Larry A. Grant Interview Date: September 15, 2010 Location: Charleston, SC Length: 133 minutes START OF INTERVIEW Leroy Baker: Are we on? LG: We are on now. What I’ll do is, just kind of an introductory thing to get us started, then we just talk, is if you can tell me, give me your full name, when and where you were born, and then we’ll just kind of take it from there. LB: Okay. I am Leroy H. Baker, Jr. Born in November the second, 1924. LG: Coming up on a birthday. LB: In (Tunkhannock?) Township, Pennsylvania. Because that’s an Indian lore name, in order to better identify my place of birth is that, I was twenty-two miles [west] of Scranton and twenty-two miles north of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. LG: Okay. LB: That’ll (zero-line?) the Susquehanna River, the area where I was born. LG: Yeah. Okay. So, were you actually born out in the country? You had mentioned your family had a farm when we were talking. LB: Yes, they had. They were farm, my dad was a farmer, and also his father, my �Leroy H. Baker 2 paternal grandfather, was in the lumber business. And in his earlier years, my dad, in addition to working on a farm, he was also in cahoots with his father, my grandfather. And so, he sort of let the family take care of most of the farming, and he concentrated on the other side of the business. And of course, when my grandfather died, they sold the interests, and he came back to literally running the farm again. LG: Farming, no lumber after that, then. LB: Other than to sell a tract now and then of saw timber, which was, well, was the case then. Now, the largest plant of Proctor & Gamble is located there. And so now, you know, the wood goes for other uses like making baby diapers. LG: I’ll be darned. Now, how long had your family lived in that area? Had you been there for long? LB: Oh, goodness. In that general area, on my paternal grandfather’s side, we have history going back into the late [1800s]. On my mother’s side of the family, her maiden name was Felker, F-E-L-K-E-R. And she was in the family line that came from Germany in very early 1800s. LG: Yeah. LB: And, so that’s sort of the background of my ancestry. LG: Right. Okay, so your father farmed, and then you had mentioned your mother taught school? LB: Yes, my mother taught school. At that point in time, in Pennsylvania, as in most rural districts, a high school education--, there weren’t all of these state teacher’s colleges, as we call them in Pennsylvania. It appeared about the top ten or top twenty students in high school took a teacher’s test, and depending on how they performed on �Leroy H. Baker 3 that screening test, they went right into public education lower grade teaching up through the eighth grade. We had eight grades in Pennsylvania. We called grammar school, grade school, whatever. LG: Right. So, she taught. How long was she engaged in teaching like that? LB: I would say, let’s see, my brother--, about eleven years. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: Eleven years. And then after the family began showing up, four boys, and we also had a female cousin whose mother died when she was a year old, and she, my mother took her and raised her, also. So, there were five dependents other than my dad that my mother had to take care of, and she did an excellent job taking care of us, too. LG: And now, you said you were the youngest child, and you were born in 1924, is that--? LB: That is correct. LG: Okay. So, 1924 then, did you spend your youth, did you grow up on the farm there and--? LB: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. LG: Yeah. Went through school and then into high school? LB: Right. And I graduated from high school in 1941. I was a pretty good college athlete, I mean, high school athlete, so I was granted a combination athletic scholarship, in combination with curriculum performance, to a junior college in northeastern Pennsylvania, which was one, a very highly rated junior college. And I was screened for the Edwin Walter Kemmerer Scholarship. And he’s best known as a department head at Princeton University. And strangely enough, while we’re on that subject--, �Leroy H. Baker 4 LG: Yeah. LB: --when I was discharged from the Navy and looked into The Citadel as a possible continuing education place is that when I went for an interview with the registrar, who was at that time Colonel [Leonard A.] Prouty, he had attended that same school when it was an academy. LG: I’ll be darned. LB: So, I was very pleased that, to be talking with someone who was familiar with the area. And of course, later that seminary became--, I mean the Keystone College, or it was Keystone Academy had become Keystone Junior College. And so then, I of course went to junior college. And I was always about a year, two years younger than most of my fellow students, I guess, because a mother with four boys and a niece, was that, I guess she sent me off to get me out from under foot (laughter), take care of the rest of them. LG: Well, she must have done a pretty good job making sure you were educated, too, to get you started in college, yeah. LB: My mother was, she was. She was. She was; my mother was the inspiration for me to do better. LG: That’s good. LB: She really was, and she did. The two-year junior college, I was pursuing a course in what was identified as commerce and finance, (8:51) of course. And in the process, in order to graduate, I had to take algebra, which I didn’t take in high school. I had to take chemistry, which I didn’t take in high school. And my mother, being away from it as long as she was, she could take it on just like it was--, I did it yesterday. �Leroy H. Baker 5 LG: I’ll be darned. LB: So, she was, she was a real inspiration. LG: Yeah. Well, that’s good. You graduated in forty-one, then that would have been early in the year before, I mean, war was going on in Europe, but the United States wasn’t involved yet at that point. LB: Yeah, well, that’s right; I graduated from junior college in 1942. 1942. Seven days after my eighteenth birthday, a recruiting group with the Marine Corps was visiting the college. And Art Wall, who later became one of the champion, golfing champions, was a classmate of mine, and I were the only two that applied for Marine Corps. And he was not accepted. I was. So, the underlying scheme at that particular time was, of those people who had two years of college, your best bet was to stay in college as long as you could and establish a better source for recruiting at higher levels. And that panned out that, that worked out to be that way. So, I stayed in the Marine Corps Reserve and active duty for, let’s see--. The years get a little convoluted there with me. I graduated from Keystone in forty-three. LG: In forty-three. Okay, that’s right. You said you had graduated from high school in forty-one. LB: Forty-three. LG: Okay. Graduated from Keystone in forty-three. LB: Right, from Keystone Junior College. Well, called Scranton Keystone Junior College. LG: Right. You had already joined the Marine Corps Reserve--, LB: Yes, I was. Yes, I was. �Leroy H. Baker 6 LG: --at that time. So, in forty-three, you’re finished with junior college, and at that point, I assume that the Marines wanted more of your time. LB: They did. And they got more of it. LG: They got more. LB: Yep. And strangely enough, at that point in time, the needs of the service weren’t going full speed, but they were picking up speed with what was going on because of the expansion of the war and so on. And so, I waited for--. Let’s see, they called up out of our group two classes to go to Camp Lejeune, to OCS, and being younger, they did it by age brackets. LG: Um-hmm, right. LB: And here I was, younger about a year and a half to two years younger than all of the rest of them, is that a draft would come through and my name wouldn’t be on it, another draft comes through and my name wouldn’t be on it. And I was getting excited about, you know, getting into this war and getting it over with. LG: Sure, sure. LB: That was sort of the gung-ho attitude, particularly in the Marine Corps. And so, the opportunity came up for qualifying people, qualifying candidates to take a classification test, a little beyond just a classification test but more or less of an achievement type test, to fill out a class at Northwestern University, a midshipman’s class. So I said, well here’s my opportunity to get going here and get this war won. So, I took the test and passed it. And so I, they had to reconvert me from a Marine to a midshipman, and they did that at a pre-midshipman’s school at Asbury Park, New Jersey. LG: Okay. That’s kind of like a preparatory school, or what kind of school was �Leroy H. Baker 7 that? LB: This was a Navy pre-midshipman school. And so I went there, and soon thereafter, I was called up. I got my orders to go to Northwestern University Midshipman’s School. And I did and graduated in September there of forty-four. So, I was a latecomer, but did get in on the tail end of WWII. LG: So, you came out of Northwestern then, you were commissioned as an ensign? LB: I was commissioned as an ensign, yes. LG: Okay. So, from September forty-four, where did you go after school? Were you assigned to a ship then? LB: I was assigned to a ship in a very strange situation. Incidentally, back then the big ships, the big former luxury liners had been converted into troop transports type. I sailed on a Dutch liner, a 37,000-tonner, at one time had held the blue ribbon for crossing the Atlantic, Nieuw Amsterdam. LG: Nieuw Amsterdam. LB: And, first place, ran into a hurricane on the way over, so that made me wonder why I left the Marine Corps to go to the Navy. LG: Yeah, I can understand that. LB: And, I was assigned, I had orders to the U.S.S. Miantonomah, CM-10, which was a large Navy mine layer. LG: Right. LB: Mine layer quote mine sweeper combination. It had previously been something else, and the Navy took it over. �Leroy H. Baker 8 LG: You said it was Miantonomah? LB: Miantonomah, right. LG: Miantonomah, okay. LB: Well, the strange thing that happened was, is that when we had berthed at Firth of Clyde in Scotland on the Nieuw Amsterdam, and we went through the Navy processing center that was there, and the individual that I was talking to, he said, well, we’re going to have to give you a change of orders. Miantonomah was sunk the other day. LG: Yeah, you would, would need new orders, then. Yeah. I'll be darned. LB: Well, then they, then, because I had this change of orders, you had to go, they had the Navy, they had the station pretty much along the coast of England that is, that is, that would be the south coast of England, east coast. And so, you go to Base One at Rosneath, Scotland, Base Two at here and Base Three here. And so, this is what we did, and I finally wound up with orders to the U.S.S. Southland. LG: Okay. LB: Which was a more or less of a utility ship. It was taken over by the British and had been a small passenger liner, coastal passenger liner, passenger liner and had been converted. And we had facilities for berthing, basic medical services, and a very--, quite an array of assignments. We at one time were a mother ship for a squadron of American PT Boats. We had our little brothers all tied up all around us, well, wherever we were. We kind of moved with, as the war progressed and victories progressed, we moved with them. LG: Now, this was in the Atlantic, still? �Leroy H. Baker 9 LB: This was in the European theater. LG: I’ll be darned. You know, I’ve read a lot about the Navy. I’ve never read about PT boats in the Atlantic. LB: Oh, yes, yes. LG: That’s interesting. LB: We sure did. We had ‘em. LG: Yeah. So, you were essentially the tender, then. LB: We were the, more than that. You know, they have to have some place to sleep, so we were a billeting ship. We sort of followed the progress of the war. We had billeted Navy nurses, medical specialists, you name it. We’ve had to move troops, and after the, shortly after we had invaded the continent, we moved to, let’s see, we first went to Cherbourg. LG: Okay, sure. LB: Operated out of there. Then we were moved to Le Havre, as the southern progress--, LG: Making your way up. LB: --making their way up. We sort of followed along. But the, we had the PT boats, we had was while we were tied up, good Navy term, tied up--, LG: That’s right. LB: --along the docks at Portland-Weymouth, England. LG: Okay. LB: And occasionally, after the war progressed, the PT boats, sort of their activity diminished because, well, for obvious reasons. �Leroy H. Baker 10 LG: Sure. LB: As a matter of fact, one of the highlights of my tour of duty aboard the Southland was--. Oh, incidentally, we were also the mother ship for a Polish Motor Torpedo Boat Division, which would be four boats. LG: Four boats, okay. LB: Four boats. So, we were mother ship to them periodically. They were always very grateful for having us as their quote, billeting ship. We fed them there, we did repair work, we did it all. The day of the German surrender, they invited me, and the chief engineer on the Southland to join them to join them and go out and accept the surrender of [U-149], a highlight in, during that period of time. And it was strange. (Nick McKera?) was chief engineer, and I said to Nick, you know it seems strange, that here [U-149] is surrendering and they will indicate the surrender flag, which was their colors flown upside down, in sending out Polish Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron, because you know, if they just decided all of a sudden, well you know, we’re going to submerge and continue the war. Well, I should have known that the British wouldn’t be counted out as number one in the surrender. When we got out there, there were two British cruisers standing by. LG: Standing by to take it. LB: So, I turned to Nick, and I said, well, I feel more secure now. LG: Yeah. Now, was this, was the boat surrendering, was this a German U-Boat or a German--? LB: A German U-Boat. And the [149], which had a tremendous battle history. LG: Oh, so [U-149]. LB: The one oh, the [U-149], was the German. �Leroy H. Baker 11 LG: That was the German. Yeah, because I think of PT-109, and I think of--. LB: Oh yeah, not 109, [U-149]. LG: One forty nine. LB: Yeah, well I call it PT too; they added--. Well, they were a torpedo boat, too. LG: Okay, so it was--. LB: The 109 is that--, that’s why, 149. LG: Okay. So, it’s like the German E-Boats then, were the, were the patrol boats like the PT boat. So it was actually--. LB: No, it wasn’t--. I know about the E-Boats. No, it was a submarine. LG: It was a submarine. Okay. LB: Yes, the submarine that had surrendered. LG: Okay, all right. LB: I think I have the name. I have a picture in there of it, and I think it’s--. You know, here are these details that I haven’t even mentioned that in fifty years. LG: Sure. So, the British cruisers are there, you’ve got the German U-boat--. LB: Submarine had surfaced. LG: Right. And the Polish torpedo boats all together. Who got to take the surrender in the end? LB: British, of course, was an Allied representative, but they attended the ceremony. They had either the skipper or the exec on that one PT boat. There was one PT boat. No, there were, excuse me, there were two. Because I remember we were going out in formation. There were two. And I think it was the exec on one and the skipper on the other that were part of the, well, ceremony, if you want to call it that. But it was hardly a �Leroy H. Baker 12 ceremony, because we left shortly after the formalities of the surrender. And we went back to work, back to, at that time, we were operating out of Portland-Weymouth. And we’d operated out of two or three different ports, and (on?) down on Land’s End and, you know, wherever we need, wherever we were needed. LG: Right, right. What was your job on the Southland? LB: Oh, goodness. We had a very short crew, very small crew on there. I was primarily navigator. Our communications officer was transferred and not replaced for about three months, so I was navigator and communicator. And, then later on, I went back to the navigator and also watch-stander, of course. LG: Sure. LB: Automatically watch-stander. And, and some collateral duties like laundry officer and those things that you inherit as a junior officer. And I guess that was probably about it, with the Southland. LG: Yeah. Well, when the, so when the surrenders took place, obviously the, that would’ve been May or sometime there in 1945. LB: Yeah, May sixth, I think, ninth, sixth, I think it was. LG: Yeah. So, the war is over in Europe at that point. What were the Navy’s plans for you and Southland after that? LB: Well, the Southland was decommissioned. LG: Okay. LB: I was assigned back to the United States, F-F-T. LG: Right, yeah. LB: You know about that. �Leroy H. Baker 13 LG: For further transfer, yep, sure do. LB: Of course, at that point in time, we just knew it was just a matter of time we’d, with the war going on in the Pacific, that we’d be going to the Pacific. That did not happen. Of the direct transfer from the ship, I was, we were, Chuck (Arnot?), who was a fellow graduate from Northwestern, had been together all this time, both he and I were assigned to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Team in London. LG: Oh, okay. LB: That certainly doesn’t infer the Navy’s involvement. They were very much involved, because they had, this was an Allied effort. LG: Right, right. LB: And the British were primarily in charge of getting the information pertaining to navy, naval installations in Europe that were, of course, under control of Germany. And of course, Italy had surrendered earlier, and they weren’t much part of it at the end of that war. So, Chuck and I again worked together. I was assigned, my assignment was to, of all people, a navy, a British Navy captain, an English Navy captain by the name of Baker. So, I would, when anybody would, the name Baker would come up, and they’d say, gee, he looks young to be a captain. Was obvious I wasn’t. But anyway, my assignment was to determine the impact of aerial bomb--, Allied bombings of the German submarine pens. LG: Okay, yeah. LB: And other affiliated activities. Now, this other affiliated activities can take ninety-five percent of your time. But the people say, well what’s--, but there were a number of those, too, like, pull you off this assignment you were supposed to be on �Leroy H. Baker 14 today, and this has come up as a higher priority. Well, anyway, that’s what I did. LG: Okay, so instead of going back to the States right away--, LB: I went to the--. LG: --you were in the Strategic Bombing--? LB: Right, I was assigned as a part of the Strategic, United States Strategic Bombing Survey. And we did all sorts of things. The British had a bomb that was 12,000 pounds, that was British, who had a name--, that was supposedly capable of penetrating German submarine pens. On further inspection, which was part of the job I was in, we determined the deepest penetration they ever got was two feet. LG: I’ll be darned, yeah that’s--, LB: And of course they had 11 feet of, interlaced with iron, steel, whatever. LG: Where was this located? Where were the, where were the sub pens? Were these in France or Holland? LB: Oh gosh, wherever. Lorient, La Pallice. They even had one training pen in Yugoslavia, of all places. Let’s see Lorient, La Pallice, right across the harbor, on the Seine River. This is where I, where my, this is where the--. Le Havre, Cherbourg. LG: Okay. LB: And down south, there’s one more. It’s a main port in--, on the European coast. I can’t come up with the name of it now. But anyway, all of this kind of gets lost, you know, over the years with a quick take back. I tried to rehearse my brain a little last night for this. But its arousal rate is slowing down with the years. You can sort of start subtracting at about age forty-five. LG: I don’t know if that’s good news or not. Now, the sub, so, the submarine �Leroy H. Baker 15 pens, how big--, I mean, I think I understand the general layout. These were, you’d have the docks or the piers inside a big concrete structure. LB: That’s correct--, reinforced steel structure, absolutely. LG: So, how big were these things inside? I mean was this a--? LB: Big enough to put a submarine in there, with a little to spare. LG: Okay. So, just one sub at a time in these things, or were some of them larger than that? LB: Let’s see. There were dual pens at La Pallice. La Pallice is where they had the, as I best recall, there’s one set of double pens--, well, you know. LG: Sure. LB: They had bulk, it appeared, it appeared that during the time of Hitler’s regime, they had a very well-documented and thought out plan for what they were going to do. And in some of these areas that we visited, there was evidence that there was further construction underway but had been terminated when things started after the invasion of the mainland. LG: Sure. Fall apart. LB: Yeah. Yeah, they were sort of put on hold, like half of the things that we have now in the military are on temporary hold. LG: Yeah. Now, okay, so you did this for how long? I mean were you--? LB: Until after the war was over in the Pacific. LG: Okay, so that would’ve been like, September or something. So, quite a long time then? LB: Yes, yeah. Well, it wasn’t really that long because we hadn’t, see, we hadn’t �Leroy H. Baker 16 decommissioned the ship that long before that. LG: Okay, okay. LB: So, decommissioned the ship and off we went to there. The U.S.S.B.S. One of the things that really impressed me was, here again, this ol’ boy from out in the country in northeast Pennsylvania had a secret classification to go to the Bushy Park Library outside of London. LG: Okay, yeah. LB: Where the American Air Force had their secret operations, plans, and what have you. To have a clearance to go there, and, ‘cause I’d have to go out. You know, someone tell me about a Disney bomb, I had no idea what a Disney bomb was. I’d seen some bombings, but I didn’t know the difference between a Disney and anything else. Well, come to find out, these are those big boys. So, we did a lot of our work at Bushy Park, which was this facility outside of London. LG: Now, I've heard of that in connection with the British intelligence. I didn’t realize that there was American operations there, too. [British intelligence worked at Bletchley Park.] LB: Yeah, yeah. LG: Oh. So, that was part of the Strategic Bombing Survey work that you did? LB: Yep. LG: Then you made the trip around and visited the sites and actually measured the holes in the concrete. LB: Oh yes, yeah, yeah. And the, and the effect of, then we, I worked on that, and after we got some basic work done on that, Chuck stayed with that, and they put me in �Leroy H. Baker 17 with Captain Baker, the British Captain, and we, the effect of defensive land mining, the effectiveness of defensive land mining of the European coast. LG: Okay, so these would be like, the defenses on the D-day beaches or something like that? LB: Yes. Well, primarily, you know, the principal ones you think of are Cherbourg, and Le Havre, but there were, you know, there were different beaches at these places. The Americans took the brunt of it right up there. The British beaches, you know, they practically went over and set up a picnic table. You know, these other ones caught hell. And you know, been over there dozens, you know, trips across channel, and that was, you know, almost every area that we went into, of course, with accessible, this was on the Southland, was the exception--, was, you could get off the ship, go down the dock a ways, and that’s about it. But every place we went dry docks had been sunk, and the caissons had been blown up. And an awful mess. As a matter of fact, at Le Havre and Cherbourg, in-between there, we go from here to there, to here to there and back to London, back to this, buried--, or not London but to Portland Weymouth, or we’re in the coastal towns. Awful, the ravages, I mean, those places were just, you know they’d, first of all, first of all, they had been being bombed for God knows how long by the British and then by the Americans, other Allies, I should say. And then there was the Germans blowing these facilities up so they could not be used by the invading forces. And they had actually some, a couple of German U-Boats that were sunk in the dry docks. And they had one that was strange. I tried to find the picture last night of a, you know, the German E-Boats were larger than ours. LG: Right. �Leroy H. Baker 18 LB: They were diesel powered. And let’s see, it was in the dry dock. Of course, they say the mouth of the dry dock, the point over here, in the dry dock, this part, no, this part was right-side up and this part, the aft, was upside down, where of course it’d been split in half. LG: So, they blow the boat in half and then it would twist in the dock. LB: Yeah, and one of them turned opposite to the--. The bow was right; the stern was upside down. LG: I’ll be darned. LB: Where I guess one of these big bomb--. We had some tremendous bombs on those, aerial bombs. And it was very interesting. LG: Yeah. When did, how long--? Now, you said that lasted until after the surrender in the Pacific. So, now you’re about the end of 1945. LB: That’s correct. LG: Right, so what was--? LB: Came home and took some of the terminal leave I had, like I don’t know how many days. Took a bunch of it. But I had orders to the Navy Receiving Station in Charleston. LG: Okay. LB: And so, that’s sort of where I came to the Charleston area. I had to check because I didn’t know. Well, I did know there was a Charleston, South Carolina. But I was thinking, there’s not a naval facility in Charleston, West Virginia, that I know of. LG: Well, if somebody had told me Charlestown at one point, I would have thought that, okay, Charleston or Charlestown. Because, you know, maybe you’re going �Leroy H. Baker 19 to Boston, but--. So, I was wondering how you got from Pennsylvania to Charleston. Was this how you made the transition then? LB: Well, I had orders. My orders were after leave to report to the Receiving Station, Charleston. And of course, you know, during that time, you talk about--, it was easier at war than it was at all. Listen, at one time we had twenty-one destroyers in Charleston awaiting, about a third to a half of them, awaiting release from the Navy. Can you imagine? And I am at Naval Receiving Station, Charleston. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: So, we had--. It was, you would not believe it was a rat race. Later on, they took over what had previously been the old air station in Charleston. Did you know there was a Naval Air Station in Charleston at one time? LG: No, I didn’t. LB: Oh yes, yeah. They took over the air station and set up a separate command for a separation center. But, the flow from ship to base to the receiving, to the separation center here is still where I am. LG: Yeah, you’re still sitting at the base then, down there? LB: Well, I’m down here where everybody is--, well, there was--, just numbers of thousands of people that are coming through this process. Well, these people coming in, most of these were from the Pacific, these ships that had come in. Come in and they’d say, oh, what the--, I won’t say the word. Here are these shore-based people that, and you know, they were holding me up from getting separated. And dad called me last night and told me that he was going to have to get the wheat cut this year within the next thirty days, and if I’m not home, the crop’s going to be ruined. And then you get two or three �Leroy H. Baker 20 powerful senators or officials down in Georgia or wherever would call and want him to be released at first opportunity. And my, one of the jobs I had, I was fortunate, because at that time, my rank--. There was a full lieutenant; I was a j.g. [lieutenant, junior grade] and had an another upcoming j.g. who was made junior grade lieutenant. The three of us were permanent duty officers. Permanent duty officers, that meant every three days you were it for twenty-four hours. I did not think there were that many sailors in the United States Navy, to be honest with you. But anyway, they, everybody is anxious for them, and particularly the ones from the Pacific. You know, here we are, we’ve been gone for Lord knows how long, well up to two years, or maybe longer. And here it is, people are coming and wanting to get through this filtration process. And the first ones that get are here and of course the first ones they faced is the duty officer. Well, we beefed up our staff, well, 100 percent or more. And the way we did it was, we had these people coming in on ships, and of course, at that point in time, the plan was for these ships to be decommissioned and preserved, in a preservation process in Charleston. So, there were people on board these ships that were beginning to come in that wanted to stay in the Navy. So, fortunately we were able to staff our, the added staff came from those ships. LG: Right, okay. LB: Which was a godsend. We could not have made it otherwise. So, I stayed on there for, until I started school at The Citadel. I took a month off before school started in September at The Citadel, which would have been forty-six now we’re into. So, I had made arrangements with my good friend I mentioned earlier to pretty much transfer all of my credits to The Citadel. And then I finished up there as a veteran student. LG: Okay. �Leroy H. Baker 21 LB: I stayed in the Navy Ready Reserve all that time, Ready Reserve. LG: Right. Now, so when you, when was you last day on active duty? I mean, what--, so, that would’ve been early in forty-six or--? LB: Yes, would have been in August of forty-six. LG: Okay. So, August forty-six then, you’re in the reserves and basically free to go to school? LB: That’s correct. LG: Then, okay. LB: Right. LG: So, you start The Citadel and--? LB: Finished up in forty-eight with my degree in, I’ve forgotten what it’s called for, but commerce and finance, whatever it is, or accounting. It sort of embodies three or four sub-classifications. LG: Right, okay. So, forty-eight. At what--, now you came to The Citadel as a veteran student. I understand that right after the war, the majority of the students at The Citadel were veteran students. The Corps of Cadets was actually pretty small. LB: I think that describes it very well, as I remember, yes. LG: Yeah. Okay, so you’re there for two years. What, anything in particular that you remember about The Citadel? About being there? LB: A lot of things. I was always very proud of The Citadel. Because, being from northeastern Pennsylvania at one time, and you wouldn’t remember this because now we’re going way back. I was born in 1924. Most of the recruits to major colleges came out of Pennsylvania. And a large part of them, see, that was the heart of our industry there �Leroy H. Baker 22 was anthracite coal mining and farming. LG: Right. LB: And so, many of these, many of my classmates were first-generation from low countries in Europe; Poland, Russia, and all the other satellite, I’ll call them satellite countries, and there are numbers of them there. Lithuania. So, these, the first generations, were my classmates in not only grammar school, but high school. LG: Right, these were the first generation born in the United States then? LB: Yeah. Lot of S-K-Y ending, S-K-I, or so on. Wonderful neighbors, and here again was, you know, living in that environment, the man that ran the little grocery store in the community where I was, his name was Peter (Rusenevitch?). LG: Be German? Or not German, but Russian or Polish? LB: Russian. LG: Russian yeah. LB: And the Lithuanians were S-K-Is. I learned this, the S-K-Is. The S-K-Ys were Polish. And so that’s, you sort of--, and you know that the amazing thing to me was, these were--, their parents probably didn’t know a word of English. And here were these-. And getting back to the resource for major college recruiting, the hard part was getting these people to go to college so you could recruit them from college. But we had a number of Citadel players who were scholarship people that they came out of northeastern Pennsylvania. And it was a major recruiting area. As a matter of fact, when I finished junior college, when I finished junior college, I was interviewed, I had been interviewed to attend Syracuse University. I wasn’t big. I was 180 pounds. But listen, I played alongside one of the biggest tackles that in junior college football that I had ever �Leroy H. Baker 23 known. And he weighed 225 pounds. A lot of people don’t remember that. But you look to see who people are now that weigh 300, 325 pounds. You know, we didn’t have those. That wasn’t the situation there. Andy Victor played The Citadel. Paul (Dombrowski?), Tom, oh gosh, one of the leading ball players at The Citadel, Tommy. Oh, Lord, he would shoot me if he knew I didn’t remember his name. He used to ride home with me. I got a car, and we would, I’d go home during the holidays. Marcinko. Tommy Marcinko. Yet they get a name, (Dombrinski?)--. LG: Yeah, that’s right. Did you play football at The Citadel, or was that--? LB: I went out for football at The Citadel, and I was doing quite well, but I made one mistake. We were scrimmaging, and my good friend Tommy Marcinko, who I played against in high school, we were scrimmaging. Tommy Marcinko was pretty fast, but I was, I had--, Burke Watson and I were the fastest guys on the team, but we didn’t play backfield. He played end. I was end. I tackled Tommy from behind, and you may not remember when those cleats were about--now I think the backfield cleats, if they’re that big, or they may be rubber--they used to be hard rubber about that long. LG: Yeah, I can remember real three quarter inch--, LB: You remember them? LG: --yeah, steel cleats, but--, LB: Well, anyway I tackled him from behind and didn’t roll, and I separated my chest bone. LG: I’ll be darned. LB: Right here. And by the way, it still lives with me. Well, obviously that approach to football was over, and I knew it. You know, I was put on three, four years �Leroy H. Baker 24 and I was getting up, in love with a lovely young Charleston lady. And I said, you know, oh Lord, I had Dr. [Robert S.] Cathcart--. We used to call the Father, Whispering Willie, he had voice impediment and then (51:27), oh listen, but anyway, take that off of the--, but I’ll tell you a lot of the people in my generation at The Citadel would laugh at that because they knew Whispering Willie, too. I was--, when I got out of the hospital, of course, I went into the facility there at The Citadel, and I realized that this was--, you know, here I’m losing--, I’m getting out of step with my education and so on and so forth. Taped, and special--, well, the foolishness you have to go through. So, I did not--, I had Tommy turn in, the guy I tackled, my best friend, turned in my uniform. And went out. And so, I would run into the coach and he’d say, you think you’re going to give it a try again? And I’d say, coach, you know full well I can’t do that. I said, you know, I’m still recovering from the damage. This is like, months later. So, I gave it up. I hated to, because I think I could’ve contributed to the team. I wasn’t very big but was I hard to catch. LG: Well, there are still some football players that fit that category. Not everybody out there on the field is 300 pounds. Some pretty fast, light--, LB: Oh, boy, hasn’t that--, that has changed, hasn’t it? LG: Sure has. LB: Anyway, back when I was--, back when I was coming along, even at The Citadel, Rufus Haltswanger was probably the biggest guy on the football team. Rufus weighed 235. LG: Yeah, he had a--, LB: But, when Decker got through with him, Rufus was less than that. �Leroy H. Baker 25 LG: Oh, goodness. So, your focus gets switched to your academics then? LB: Much more in focus than they had been before that. But I had always done pretty well. And this is where my mother gets a lot of credit. You know, if you want to get off the farm, the best way to do it is by the way of a good education. And I’ll tell you one thing right now, she was never more right. Because there were those of us who were veterans who did and who didn’t. And you know, a lot of my friends, well, about--. I don’t have many living friends. I’ll be eighty-six my next birthday. You know, the ones that--, you know, I loved living on the farm. Oh, boy. Between my uncle and my dad, we owned, they owned 367 acres of--, two-thirds of which was woodland. Hunting, best hunting, small game, deer, bear. A creek flowing a half a mile wide, nice--, LG: (Sneeze) Excuse me. LB: Fresh flowing stream. Good fishing. That’s hard to leave. LG: It is. That‘s a pretty good sized farm, too, even if, you know--, LB: Well, that--, yeah. Well, that wasn’t all farm. Mostly woodland. LG: Yeah, you had what, about 110, -20 acres then that you farmed and the rest--? LB: Yeah, between the two farms, probably like, more--, like, more than--, seventy-five, because we had to have, with the cattle, dairy farm, you had to have a lot of grazing land that was not tillable. LG: Yeah. LB: I mean, you kept the brush cut and you went out and over-seeded it once in a while. You put lime down and did those things to create pasture, keep the brush cut. ‘Cause that grows just like the grass did. LG: It sure does, it sure does. So, you graduate in forty-eight, go out and look for �Leroy H. Baker 26 a job. How were--, how’d that work? LB: Well, John (Marker?) was over, there was an overflow, major oversupply of veterans--, LG: Yeah, I can imagine. LB: Who were looking for a job. I made the mistake of--. Headquarters for the Sixth Naval District was here in Charleston. LG: Right. LB: Being a veteran, I was told by the personnel officer, he said, if you want to, while you’re on active duty, if you want to start greasing the path to civil service--I told him that I wanted to finish college--, LG: Right. LB: --and, if you wanted to grease the path for civil service employment, there’s not much I can do for you when you graduate. But there’s a lot I can do for you now. Well, this came like a bolt of lightning to me, ’cause I--. Just between you and me and the lamppost, to me, the civil service employees that I dealt with as a naval officer never impressed me. And you might want to cut that out. LG: Yeah, I've been unimpressed at times myself. LB: So, but there again, not being experienced in the world, I didn’t. I told Lieutenant Hughes, no, I appreciate that. He said well, you’ve done a good job for us. Oh, I was the recorder of the summary court martial board, too. And you know, summary court martial, you’re judge, jury, defender, rules writer, and the whole bit. LG: Pretty much. LB: Yeah. So, with all of these, all of these people coming in from all of these �Leroy H. Baker 27 ships in the Pacific where a lot of them had been for two years, God! Our brig, I don’t know what the population was, but it was big. So, I was also a recorder at the summary court martial board, and the problem was, is that I all still had my duty, my twenty-four hour duties every third day right on, with a--. So, if I didn’t get to meet him out here and listen to the cursing and so on, or where they had gone out and gotten drunk the night before at Ma Kelly’s somewhere and listening to the Marines out front, drilling them and getting them re-trained. This was, it was a mad house. It really was. But it was a part of history I wouldn’t have missed for anything in the world, ‘cause you got to see human nature from literally the ground up into infinity. LG: So, did that affect your decision for a job after you graduated then? Were you thinking, no more of this? LB: Well, but then you see, what happened was, the veteran’s preference sort of thing began to come in, and with that you had a lot of officers, who had gotten out who already had their degrees and this type of thing, that were ahead of you. ‘Cause see, they were already qualified when I was starting to finish up at The Citadel. LG: Yeah. LB: So, I was fortunate a former, a Citadel graduate, who himself was a veteran, hired me at the Bay Fruit Company, which was a major distributor here. Wholesale fruit, produce, canned goods, shortening, God knows what all. It was a pretty good job. And I stayed with them until I was called back into the Navy. LG: And when, when was that? LB: I got my orders in October, I believe, and I had a specified period in which I had to report. So, I hung on until it was like sixty days or whatever it may have been. I �Leroy H. Baker 28 took most of it to stay on the job. LG: Now this was in October of--, what year would that have been? LB: That would’ve been forty-eight--. LG: Were you called up for Korea? LB: Let’s see. Well, from the time I went into the reserve at The Citadel, I had stayed in the reserve, and worked at Bay Fruit, and I was recalled in fifty--. Gosh, I guess I’ll have to go--. This is where the stroke got me. LG: So, this is--, but this is for the Korean War? LB: Yeah, up through the Korean War. LG: Okay, ‘cause that--, North Koreans invaded in June, I think, the end of June of 1950. So, sometime then after that, so it could’ve been the end of 1950 or--. I mean had the war been going on very long when you--? LB: I think I was called up in--I’ll have to stop and think about my work career--I think I was called up in fifty-two. LG: In fifty-two, okay, so the war had been going on for a while--, LB: Yes, yeah. LG: When you were called up, okay. LB: Right. And that’s when I went aboard the destroyer, the U.S.S. Porter, DD800. Which was a replacement for the original, one of the--. There were two Porter boys outstanding in naval history, Dog [David] Dixon Porter and the other one [Commodore David Porter]. The ship that was named after one of them had been sunk [DD-356, sunk at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, October 26, 1942]. And I was on the replacement for that ship. It was sunk early in the war. And so, the, I was on the second--. Well �Leroy H. Baker 29 there’d been a number of them named for the Dixons in naval history. But 800 was the replacement number. LG: Okay. LB: The, yeah, the second modern-day destroyer there. LG: Okay, do you remember what class of ship? Because I remember the, there were Fletchers? Or was it an earlier class? LB: Four--, four forty-five. LG: Four forty-five, that’s--, LB: That’s a flush deck. LG: Okay, a flush deck? LB: Mm-hmm. Five single mounts. LG: Right. Right, okay. That’s right. The five, yeah. What, two forward, two aft, and one--? LB: One in the middle. LG: In the middle? Yeah. LB: It was, and I was gunnery officer on it. And that was the one I always prayed that, you know, because of where it was set, if your stops didn’t work, you’d blow up the bridge. LG: Shoot the bridge? LB: Yeah. LG: Yeah, that’s not good. LB: And, you know how the, initially, we had the search, big search lights on it, is if that mount, the only time you used it is, you know, when you were sinking. Oh God, it �Leroy H. Baker 30 was--. But anyway, the stops always worked. LG: Yeah. Well, that’s good. LB: And, we, so, then I was, you know, then I reported in March of fifty-three, I guess it was. LG: Okay. So, the Porter deployed then? LB: No, as a matter of fact she was about--. I got on board about four days before she was deployed. I stopped, I waited, like, I waited until essentially the last minute, because my wife was pregnant. And I wanted to see that through as far as I could and then report. And I had gone aboard the ship and explained to the Captain that, you know, nothing I’d rather have done than to come in early and he said, well, they had contacted me. The exec had called me and so on, and that, well, can you come aboard? Can you commit to next week? I’d say, oh no, we’ve got a little time left here before the baby was due, and whatever. And so, I reported aboard. I’m going to stop and think about it. Probably was in March fifty-three. LG: Yeah, okay. LB: February, March--, it was March. LG: Okay. And then they deployed right after that? LB: Well, we went the usual Gitmo route. LG: Sure. LB: Yep. And, we did plane guard duty, you know, for training in the Atlantic or wherever. And back then, you know, destroyers were the plane guards. LG: That’s right, yeah. LB: We didn’t have any helicopters. And you were mentioning the French carrier. �Leroy H. Baker 31 Did it happen to be one of the converted ones? What was the name of it? The Lafayette? LG: No, the one that I went on was, I think it was a purpose-built and probably not commissioned until, I don’t know, maybe the early 60s. LB: Oh, yeah. LG: I think it was Jean d'Arc. But that would’ve been after this quite a while. LB: It was the Lafayette was the name of it. LG: The Lafayette was a French carrier? LB: Um-hmm. We plane guarded them down off Gitmo, and we lost three or four planes. They did. But you know, destroyers is for plane guard purposes, unless the pilot’s alive and they can get out of his--. LG: Get out of the cockpit? LB: Yeah. LG: But now, plane guarding, I, you know, having done this, it’s probably the same thing. You’re sitting about, oh, six hundred, maybe a thousand yards astern, one quarter or the other of the carrier, just waiting for the guys to fall off the deck then, basically. Okay, yeah. LB: Well, what happened, my experience was, in that role, is that if they did not think they could make the carrier, they were going to hunt for a destroyer. LG: Yeah, and then ditch. LB: And ditch as close as they could to it. And that would, that worked out well if the pilot was able to handle the plane. But in many instances, you know, you would see them, unfortunately, grabbing at the--, to get out and couldn’t. Nothing you can do for them. �Leroy H. Baker 32 LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: Yeah, so that was plane guarding duty. And, so, when I went aboard March, I went through, and there again I was a division officer, First Division Officer, Second Division Officer. LG: Okay so you had the boatswain’s mates and seamen working for you then? LB: Um-hmm. Well, that was the gunnery, essentially the gunner--. LG: Oh, you had the gunner’s mates. Okay. LB: And I had gone up and I’d, unfortunately, I could never--. I had taken a lot of correspondence courses. I had taken eleven correspondence courses during the time I was on inactive duty. And that is in the reserve, Ready Reserves, Ready Reserves. I had taken a lot, a lot of them. All the way through the rank of captain, which of course never got there, only lieutenant commander, and the--. When I came up for commander, there were only three in whole Sixth Navy District selected, so there was pretty slim pickin’. LG: Yeah, pretty tough. LB: Yeah. But anyway, then I went on was First Lieutenant and the usual collateral duties that you have assigned and gunnery officer. Went to Newport, graduated from DESLANT Gunnery School [Destroyers Atlantic] and qualified and became Gunnery Officer. And then, that’s about the way it went until I got choice to go back to civilian life again and get into the Ready Reserve. LG: Yeah, so you stayed in the--? LB: The highest level of recall. LG: Yeah. LB: Whatever. They had different names and one time it was Ready and then �Leroy H. Baker 33 there was Selected, and whatever the handle was on it. LG: Sure, yeah. But that was, so, that was your--. How long were you on active duty at that time then? LB: Korea? LG: Yeah. LB: Two years. LG: So, two years. So from fifty-three to fifty-five then, about? LB: That’s right. Sounds right. LG: Did you--? LB: So, yeah, it’s fifty-three to, fifty-, yeah, fifty-five. LG: Okay, so you made a, where did you deploy during that time? Did you, you get out in the Pacific or was this Atlantic? LB: We were in the Pacific, yeah. We went down through the big ditch. LG: Okay, yeah. It’s a long ways from the east coast. LB: Well, you’re right. But you know, the amazing thing was, is they selected from, let’s see, how many divisions of destroyers? We had the--. We had a split division. One, let’s see, what’s the next grouping? Not a flotilla. What’s the, between the division and the next step up? LG: The next step up? LB: Yeah. In the group command. LG: Well, I’m not sure exactly how they would’ve done it in those days. Because now you’ve got, they don’t have divisions. You basically have a squadron that takes care of all of the destroyers. �Leroy H. Baker 34 LB: Okay. LG: And frigates and all small ones. LB: Okay, these were separate squadrons in the separate division. LG: You could have a group above that, so maybe it would be a group. LB: Yeah, but this, that wasn’t--. Based upon our record, as best I can find out from the captain, based upon our performance, well, we were assigned to the various task forces there in Korea. A selection was made of one division, which was usually four ships, of one division being selected to take the round-the-world cruise. You know, like we needed to go another 25,000 miles. But anyway, our division was selected to do that. And that, because we were the forty-five, we were the four forty-five, you know, Porter class, some of the later destroyers, the one with the two twin mounts, what was that class? LG: Gearing? [The class actually had three twin gun mounts.] LB: Gearing? LG: Yeah. LB: Yeah, Gearing, were pretty upset with the fact that this is the group, I guess they said, well, this is the last chance for these guys. Well, anyway, we did that. And we completed the round-the-world cruise. So, we started here and went wherever and ran up forty-five, fifty thousand miles, and back around, and come in back in here. LG: Yeah. How long were you off of Korea? LB: Let’s see. We left in June and we got back, we got back the week before Christmas. LG: So, that’s like what--? �Leroy H. Baker 35 LB: June, July, August--, LG: Almost 18 months then, or about 18 months. LB: October, November, December, yeah, that’s about right. LG: So, yeah, that’s a long ways away from home and a long time away from home. LB: It was, but you know we were busy. LG: Sure. LB: We were very busy. We, we established a pretty good record. We had a captain who was a little braggadocios-type guy. But I’ll tell you what, he was, he was a good skipper. A lot of the officers really didn’t care for him that much, but one thing about it was, he always surrounded himself with good, the best. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: I’ll leave it at that. So, he would volunteer for these assignments, special assignments. And so we had a lot of opportunities. We come under fire and this sort of thing. And, it was--. We ran what was called the flywheel patrol. And you would fly, you’d go, they’d send two destroyers all the way up to the border. You know, they don’t cross this meridian. And we’d go just a little further than you were supposed to, that was Captain (Slacks?). And he was, I kind of like that kind of a skipper. ‘Cause I had had a previous skipper who was a former submarine skipper, wonderful man, but he wasn’t daring. And I kind of like the--. They were both great skippers, but they were 180 degrees out of phase with the each other. LG: With each other, yeah. LB: But we, we had casualties. �Leroy H. Baker 36 LG: But tell me about that episode. What, were you patrolling off of Korea then? LB: Different segments. We would spend thirty days plane guarding, thirty days on the flywheel patrol. This was the one that went all the way up to the magic line. LG: Now, was this a line for North Korean or for Chinese--? LB: Korea. LG: Korea, yeah. LB: North Korea. And so, we, we would do that, plane guard, targets of opportunity, different sub groups, like ninety--, task force ninety-five point six was, this was their primary duty. And ninety-five, ninety-six point eight was a carrier groups. And we were, we had been mixed up in all this stuff, and some upkeep at Sasebo. LG: Sure. So, the incident then where you’re getting, where Porter’s getting shot at, what happened at that time? LB: They were taken immediately under counter battery. LG: This was a Korean shooting at you? LB: Mm-hmm. LG: Yeah. And I assume then that, you were fairly in close to shore? LB: There’s where Captain (Slacks) was different. He liked being close to the shore. But always want to, always depended on certain officers to make sure that if things got too bad is to find the fastest way out. You know, make smoke, fire off the smoke generator. This--. He was a good combat-type guy. LG: The ship ever get damaged in your--? LB: We didn’t. We had, here’s again, (Captain Slacks). What we would do, we would anchor off the coast--no, we wouldn’t anchor. We would launch one of the boats-- �Leroy H. Baker 37 we still didn’t have to strip ship--by that time we could carry the motor whale boat and then the other one, the officer’s gig. And we had, we had a search party that would go in and slip in and identify targets of opportunity. LG: Okay. LB: And a first class quartermaster took a round. And another South Korean torpedo, one of the South Korean P.T. Boats. (phone ringing) You want to cut that off? LG: Yeah, I’ll pause this. (telephone conversation) LB: Okay. He lived, but of course, then we had to rendezvous with a carrier and high line him over to the carrier and all that good stuff. So, that part, that’s why I liked the job of being First Lieutenant and then Gunnery Officer. You get, you know, you’re always busy. LG: Yeah, that’s right. LB: Always busy. But we were, we took a lot of chances under our captain. But that was his nature. That was his nature. But the, boy, those days of plane guarding the carriers down in the Atlantic, or, gosh, you know, you never read, there were a lot of casualties surrounding carriers that never really got highlighted. And you never see them focus on them, but boy, there were some unpleasant ones. LG: Yeah. Well, that’s pretty dangerous work. LB: Oh, it is. It’s, that flying off of carriers, I’ve lost, I’ve lost two or three very good friends on carriers. Matter of fact, still one of the classmates I had in junior college, I, she and her husband, and my wife and I would go back to school reunions, the junior college class reunions. And not only were she and I schoolmates, they also lived in the �Leroy H. Baker 38 same general area as I did in Pennsylvania. So, we were kind of like, kind of distant neighboring farm people. She lost her brother, Walter (Colbalt?). Another one of my classmates, two or three of my classmates were carrier pilots and took the, well, some of them--. My class was hit pretty heavy by the war. We had lost two or three submariners. And high school, good Lord, some of my high school class, you know, they were a lot of them were in the initial invasion of Europe and lost a number. I have, one of my best friends, as a matter of fact, he himself was an Air Force fighter pilot. He was a P-51’er. Lost two brothers. One was an infantryman, and the other brother was a pilot. And my friend that I was in high school with, very close friend, we still visit, he survived. He was a fighter pilot. And of course, another one of my classmates was one of the aces, Pete Wiggins. He got, I don’t know, seven kills during WWII. But, I tell you, the people that made that initial landing, and you’re I’m sure very familiar with it, but having been assigned to the survey group in London and having access to the real records, I tell you, that was a long day. LG: Yeah, I can imagine. My--. LB: Not only a long day, but after that, there were some longer days, too. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: You think of the invasion, that’s just only part of it. As a matter of fact, two guys, three of my classmates were killed after the, no, two of them were killed after the invasion, after they had gone inland. I’ve forgotten, Saint, one of the battles, Saintsomething or other. But anyway, that’s history. LG: Yeah. That’s--. You came of age at a time when there were a lot of people needed to do that job, that’s for sure. Okay, so after Korea is when you made, when your �Leroy H. Baker 39 ship left Korea, then you made your round-the-world journey. Is there anything that stands out in your mind at that, you know, from that time, Korea and your return home? LB: Nothing. But the greatest celebration, I guess, would’ve been personal and that was that I got to be home for Christmas with my family, which was now my wife and little boy. LG: Yeah. LB: And, no, we, when we got back, we were assigned to a couple of trips to Gitmo, for training or to, you know, it got to be when these bases began to be realigned and personnel levels diminished, you know what we went through there after the big dip. After World War II, things began to decline in the Navy, in particular, which was a twoocean Navy, for Pete’s sake. And so, we were sent back to Gitmo on two occasions to, to, number one, to go down and firing practice, to keep us tuned up at, not Vieques, the other one. Island, what the heck’s the name of it down there? LG: Vieques is the only one that I was familiar with. But that’s closed now, as well. LB: Yeah, that’s awful. And assistance, again carrier, working with the carrier groups. And then, of course, we were assigned to the, along with one French destroyer, working with the Lafayette where they were, French were trying to qualify some carrier pilots. That’s where the, God, they really took the toll. That’s incredible. Well, when you’re not used to that thing from the ground up, and I don’t think they ever had a carrier until we gave them the Lafayette, what they re-named the Lafayette [ex-U.S.S. Langley (CVL-27)]. LG: I think you’re right. I don’t know, you know, the history of the French Navy �Leroy H. Baker 40 after the war, but they certainly would’ve been re-building everything. I mean, you know, clearly, they had--. LB: Well, incidentally, I’d failed to, these things just sort of resurrect themselves as you talk. And after we decommissioned the Porter, and the war in Germany was over, our ship had been decommissioned, and the people from our ship formed the nucleus crew to bring back the Europa to the United States. LG: Okay, what was the Europa? I’m not familiar--? [The North German Lloyd liner Europa later became the French liner, Liberté, after the war.] LB: Oh, that was the German, big German luxury liner that set all the world records in crossings and so on. LG: Oh, okay. LB: I was part of the people originally assigned, group assigned, and I got a change of orders. I got a change of orders, and I went to USARB, Advance Receiving Base Europe, wherever you had to air your complaints or desires. Sometimes it was a combination of the two. LG: Yeah, a little of both, yeah. LB: And asked that I be, that the orders be rescinded. And they said, no, because your classification, which was USNRR, is that you would come up for separation, and we’re not too sure how long it’s going to take us to get the Europa ready to take back to the United States. And it was actually longer than they had anticipated and then they got the thing back in the United States and got sabotaged, burned in dry dock. You remember that? LG: No, no, I don’t. �Leroy H. Baker 41 LB: Oh, yeah. But--, LG: So, that was when you went to the Bombing Survey then? LB: That’s correct. Well, when they came back on the Europa, I went to New York to meet them. And there were all my old, you know, boatswain mates, and gunnery people, and fir--, a lot of the First Division people had, almost intact, had moved to Europa. And gosh, it was really something. And then when it went to dry dock, and it was sabotaged, actually. LG: Now, this was the crew, these are the people that you had served with on Southland. LB: On the Southland, yeah. LG: I’ll be darned. Yeah. Well, that’s pretty interesting. LB: Well, I said my change of orders, you know, it worked out well, because my first change of orders was out of midshipman’s school the report to the U.S.S. Miantonomah. And then I get to Glasgow and they call me in the personnel office and said, well, you’re going to have a change of orders. And I said, well, you know, why do I have this change of orders, and they said well your ship has been lost. LG: Yeah. Well that’s--, LB: But, you know what? At, when I went to Plymouth, that would’ve been Base Two, en route to the Southland. The crew, the surviving crew from the Miantonomah was also there. So, I got to meet a lot of them. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: Yeah, but they lost a lot of people on that ship, sixty-two. I did some of the survey work on that, too. My buddy did the primary work on coastal fortifications, �Leroy H. Baker 42 counter-mining, counter-mining. I worked on counter-mining too. The effectiveness of counter-mining--, LG: Right. LB: --against the Germans. We had, in our research work, we had run into the incident of the--with me working on the effectiveness of counter-mining and various assignments that I had--we ran into the in-depth of what happened there. We read in the paper that they struck a mine or whatever, which is what they did. But they never--, and here, the British were doing the research on this, so it’s where my British head of my operation, Captain Baker. LG: Captain Baker, right. LB: Yeah. And we went, we went over that. And it was never determined as to what mine blew up under the Miantonomah, literally almost, well, they killed almost all the, by the, they could--, LG: The engineers, the black gang. LB: --engineering, yeah. The black gang and the engineering department and a lot of other people were injured or killed. The source of that mine, because here it was, you know, war’s been over. You know, what’s going on? Or no, the war was still in progress inland. They determined that it was a mine laid, they, the British, determined that it was a mine laid in World War I that had emerged from its mooring and was still subterranean. I guess maybe the emergency chain, the main thing went loose and something or other else. And this huge mine that was identified as a German-built mine. LG: So, it was part of the German mining from the First World War. LB: Yeah, from the First World War. That in itself was interesting, because there �Leroy H. Baker 43 were other--in the course this study and all--gee, there were a lot of other incidents that weren’t identified, things that went on. I mean, I mean, the average person wouldn’t have the vaguest, vaguest idea of all this, the things that were going on that weren’t really positive in terms of the Allied successes. LG: I know it’s still fairly common in parts of northern France and then certainly in Germany, where you find explosives from, well, I know the French find from the First World War in the areas where the trenches were. And the Germans find, you know, Allied bombs in the cities even today. And that’s a long time ago. LB: Well, you know what? Having been to those primary cities, Marseilles. I’m starting to think earlier, Marseilles. Because you know that was the last, southern France was the last--. Let’s see, that came from the north, that came from the Mediterranean, didn’t it? LG: Yeah. LB: Yeah. I have a good friend who was with the Merchant Marines, was our engineer on the Porter, was the chief engineer on the Porter, that was severely injured in that landing down in--. LG: Yeah, that was the, what was it? Seventh Army, Dragoon, I think, was the name of the operation. But yeah, I can--. LB: Well, it was the German that bombed, he was on a merchant ship, and he was, he still has facial scars or had facial scars. Just about two months ago, he called me, and he’d lost his wife. But, there was a lot. But you know the thing that really, really, really makes this thing almost something that, did it really happen or didn’t it, in my lifetime is going to these places that had, when you stop and think about it, the--. When �Leroy H. Baker 44 you talk about a thousand bombers in the air, I’ve seen that. I have seen two squadrons of fighter planes going in. And you know, always, they’d launch the big ones, and then the fighters would come along later to intercept ahead of them. You know, to see that many planes in the sky, no one would believe it if they hadn’t seen it, ‘cause they never, they never have. Never will ever again see it. LG: No, probably not. LB: Never! LG: I would imagine that’s all gone. LB: That’s all gone. LG: Yeah. LB: On leave in Winchester, weekend leave in Winchester, I saw that. I saw that, the largest number of aircraft ever to fly over to the Continent. I saw P-38s, I saw P-40, couple of left over P-40s. I saw the Lightnings. LG: Yeah, P-47. LB: The 47s, the air-cooled engines. But the one, the 51s were the good ones, the ones to see, because they had the radiator. LG: Yeah, they’re pretty air planes. LB: Yeah. To see that, and then on the other end, go over and see what would really happen. Number one, as you go back to the end of World War I and what really happened in that area of activity, everything that had been done in preparation for the Hitler plan--the arming, re-arming, then all this--is when you see a city, cities that had gone through this, how many times that the Allies had bombed that, the area along the coast--. Well, for instance Le Havre and Cherbourg seemed to be the ones that took the �Leroy H. Baker 45 blasting, because they were the main fortification, and Marseilles. LG: Right. LB: To go in after, number one, is aerial bombing by the British and Americans, for God, how many years? Many. LG: That’s right, well, forty-two certainly for the Americans, and the British even earlier. LB: Yeah. All of this and the constant repair by the Germans, and then bomb some more and then the con--, and plane crashes that took place all over the place. To go into those cities after we invaded Europe was something that you never can describe. It’s impossible to describe it. Go in, and so here are the aerial bombings here. So, then come the invasion and whatever happens there. Not only have the invasion force, but you have the blowing up of the main fortifications before the Germans abandoned the coastal facilities, coastal defenses. You got, you have that. And then you see the intentional destruction of just about everything else that would have survived the bombings. That is particularly the military installations. To go back and see the effect of all this is just mind boggling. The most mind-boggling is to go into my computer and go to a certain town, to go in, call up the picture. Here they are, you know, pick ‘em up. Today, these beautiful marinas, hundreds of, literally, in Marseilles, hundreds of crafts that least cost would be ten million. Same thing up in Le Havre. The most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life, but then in your mind, you see both. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: I mean it just, it’s incomprehensible. LG: Yeah. Have you gotten to--? �Leroy H. Baker 46 LB: It’s boggling. LG: Have you gotten to make a trip back anytime after the rebuilding was done? LB: Well, the only, the only, see, the--. Well, yes. See, when we made the roundthe-world back from Korea, came back, we hit Cannes. LG: Okay. LB: And what’s the other? LG: Well, you came up through Suez Canal. LB: Suez Canal. LG: And the southern French ports, Nice. LB: Nice, yeah. LG: Did you get to Toulon, Marseilles? LB: Marseilles. But they weren’t the ones that were the most damaged. You see, France, Marseilles took a good bit of aerial bombing. But in terms of the, you know, it almost fell on its own. LG: Sure, northern France was the most damaged area, I would think. LB: That’s right. And, to just, and so I got to see a part of that recovery. Short, right, but nothing like it is now. I went to the same French ports and looked and, my God, on the computer. I just sit there and I think about, you know, I don’t talk much about it. I have a grandson who’s a lieutenant commander in the Navy. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: And, I stop to think about what he is seeing now. And he’s been, he was enlisted. And he took words of encouragement from his granddad, because he was a victim of a divorce. And my wife and I gave him parental guidance that he didn’t get �Leroy H. Baker 47 from either his dad or his mother at the time when they became divorced. To see what he, when he visits these ports, he’s been on the, he’s been on carriers. He was on the big boomer submarines first. LG: Yeah. LB: And he’s been on a couple of carriers. And, his vision of what he sees is what I see on TV or on the computer. But he doesn’t get to see what I saw. LG: No, that’s right. Yeah. LB: So, he doesn’t have that comparison. But one day, my friend, good friend of mine and I were, we got off on this tangent. He was in the Army, but not in WWII. And we sat, we spent an afternoon just going around different locations looking at the, the how they are now. It’s just, it’s mind boggling. Particularly those French ports that are noted, notorious for the wealthy patrons. LG: Oh, yeah, yeah. LB: Just--. And they were the ones hit the hardest in World War II. Isn’t it amazing? LG: It is. It is. Well, if you put enough effort into it, you can rebuild just about anything, I think, eventually, given enough time. But yeah, I’ve seen, you know, the opposite of what you’ve seen. I've been to Europe and traveled around, and then seen pictures of what it was like after the First World War and after the Second. And it amazes me sometimes the changes that have taken place. LB: The first time we called up on the network that--what is it?--whichever one it is. The first time, I said, well let’s go to the primary focus points. You know, we had red beach, white beach, we had various ones. You know, a couple of these beaches didn’t �Leroy H. Baker 48 meet too much resistance with the Americans. You know, they, you know, I’m surprised, you know, after the storms that destroyed all the temporary docking facilities? LG: Yeah, the Mulberry Harbors? LB: Oh gosh, yes. How, it was, we were lucky to have survived that, to have survived that. And I think that’s one of the reasons why we concentrated on this aerial bombing and just escalated it to where it, you know, went on almost constantly. There’s some way you got to stop this thing. LG: Yeah. LB: But, it was, we called up, it was Le Havre. Yeah, Le Havre. My gosh, I used to--. It’s just, you know, this rebuilding, I just hadn’t been there to see it, you know, as it progressed, but I saw it go from this to this. Just absolutely mind boggling. That beautiful harbor and all these yachts and so on. And the--. LG: It’s very pretty. LB: Well, but to see everything is so modern, to me, modern, because it’s all been rebuilt. Nothing’s there that, before, there wasn’t anything there. LG: No, that’s one of the things that we saw in, well, not just in France, but if you drive through Germany, almost all of the large cities are modern, you know, cities, which you think about it for a moment, the modernization of Germany occurred because of the Allied bombing. You know, that you had to rebuild. There was, you know, and obviously, they’ve gone back and restored things, some of the things, but a lot of the German cities are just, you know, large modern cities, and you don’t get the impression that you’re in someplace that’s been there for centuries. And some of these cities are, you know, many centuries old. �Leroy H. Baker 49 LB: Well, you’ve seen that, and, so, you know, you’ve got the blend of it. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: But to see it when it was so ravished. I just--. LG: No, I can’t imagine what that would be like. LB: It was, it was unbelievable. Because, you know, the, the Navy did more than take care of their own when they were in these areas that had taken such a whipping. You know that I don’t, I would not think that, where there was a Navy presence, even though it might be a ship, is that they would have ever allowed an ally medical help. Even though, you know, here’s a guy that might be a dock worker with one arm, or crippled, or whatever. I’ll tell you, a Navy corpsman would be there. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: To help it. ‘Cause they didn’t have that. LG: No, I would imagine--. LB: See, they had lost so many, they had lost so many of their people that, you know, someone had to go in and fill that gap. LG: Now, after you came back home then and you said your active duty time ended in fifty-five? LB: That’s correct. LG: Okay, you stayed in the reserves but--. LB: I stayed in the highest level of recall in the reserve until six months before I reached retirement, I went into the associate status. LG: Right. LB: That’s the first time I had not been in the highest level of recall, whatever �Leroy H. Baker 50 they were called. It changed from time to time. But then, when I completed my time to qualify for a limited retirement benefit, I did. LG: Yeah and when was that. Would that have been--? LB: Sixty-two. LG: Sixty-two? Okay. Yeah, I was thinking twenty years after. Okay, so fiftyfive, though, you came back and were you able to go back to the job that you’d had previously? LB: I did. I did, and by a stroke of good fortune, a neighbor across the street was a sailor in World War II. And he and I had a conversation one afternoon. He said, well, he said, I saw a communication where they’re, the accounting Westvaco Corporation--. Which made MeadWestvaco Corporation, and that was the largest industrial employer, still is, but they’re somebody else now, but Westvaco still return, retains the chemical end of the business, which operates from the residue of the paperboard, or bag manufacturing, or paper manufacturing process. LG: Okay. LB: The residual chemicals are very profitable. So, that’s retained by Westvaco Corporation. Capstone took the paper making, the wood supply, the sawmills, and whatever. Well anyway, he told me, he said, on the bulletin board, they are advertising for an accounting supervisor. And that’s a large operation. So, I applied and was accepted. LG: There you go, yeah. LB: So, I was the accounting--. And there’s a lot of aspects of accounting there. You know, you have more than that that comes with it. You’ve got your product �Leroy H. Baker 51 development group, you’ve got your chemical groups that are Allied Chemical, you’ve got your box plants, you’ve got your bag plants. That’s a division that’s called Westvaco. And people think of the paper mill sitting up there stinking the place up. And yet, and all these satellite wood yards all over, now they’re all sawmills and they operate off the residue from the sawmill operations. And so, I was in that job for--. And this job was really something, because it was when Westvaco was expanding, and any time they expanded the division, the service grew bigger and bigger and bigger. Widespread. We had an Allied plant, chemical plant in Florida, we got box plants here, we got a bag plant there, and out in California, even, we had one. And so this is, after a while, you got--. Well, then I was selected as the manager of Westvaco’s craft division. And that division (cough) encompassed all these Allied responsibilities, you know? But one thing is, is that, when we did our monthly activity reports, binder about that thick--. LG: Yeah. Well, an inch of paper’s good if you--. LB: Oh geez. But other than that, it all was rarely a two-week period that I wasn’t going to Florida, or Louisiana, or Winder, Georgia, or out in a couple of the box plants were up in the northwestern part of the country, or New York to the home office, wherever. But anyway, I stayed there until I had thirty-one years with them. LG: So, that would’ve been from the, what, from the late 50s or thereabouts then through the 80s? Is that about right? LB: Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, I retired in eighty-seven. LG: In eighty-seven, okay. Okay, yeah. Yeah, that’s quite a long career then, yeah. LB: Two careers really. �Leroy H. Baker 52 LG: It really is. LB: Because you know on--. There was a training program that came up. And I like the Navy. I like the challenges of the Navy. And they were always changing and if you appeared that you liked them, you always had somebody that would give you more, right? You remember that? LG: Yes, I do. LB: Okay. So, that was kind of how I was. You know, they’d say, if I walked down the deck, and I was also senior watch officer for couple of years, and so, but in addition to that, any time the captain would see me out in the open, he would think, (he-unintelligible) one of these collateral duties over here that there’s nobody to fill. Hey! Hey! Well anyhow, but that was good. I still like that. I liked the challenge of the work all the way through the gunnery and whenever the executive officer was on leave, I was the senior watch officer. LG: You stood in for that, too. LB: Oh, yeah. And he loved leave. He was seriously injured. He was on the West Virginia [U.S.S. West Virginia during the Pearl Harbor attack], seriously injured. Wonderful man, gosh, I dearly loved him. Both he and his wife are deceased, and I lost track of his only child, a daughter, about two years ago. But, that was, this, in service, out of commission program for the Reservists that came along. And so they immediately had some billets open for experienced people. So, there goes Baker again, diving into the unknown. But we had the U.S.S. Cool--, no, that’s the--, the Coolbaugh always comes up first because Walter Coolbaugh had a DE [destroyer escort, U.S.S. Coolbaugh (DE-217)] named for him, and there was, you know, his wife and I were, I mean, his sister and I �Leroy H. Baker 53 were classmates in junior college. And so I always say Coolbaugh. Anyway, the other DE-679 [USS Greenwood] was one of those ships. So, they wanted people who were pretty much, they had a limited crew, so they said, you know, someone had pretty much had exposure into most every area that involved accepting supply. And I always stated, anyone who had responsible for disbursing, I never crossed their paths. I always tried to keep an open route there. You remember that. LG: No, you don’t want to do anything with the money and stuff. LB: Well, anyway so--, (microphone becomes unclipped) LG: Here, I’ll hook you back up here. LB: --I jumped into that program. The next thing was, here I go again. So, I participated in that, and then they’re at sea. They had weekend things. And lo and behold, here again, the Reserve fleet, this type, this program, they chose us to take the crew at-we had mustered up from other resources in this same category--loaded them all on the 679, and down to Gitmo we go for training. So, here I go taking two years’ vacations back-to-back to, so winds up with, literally including weekends, so on about, well, I got back two days before I had to go back on the job at Westvaco. LG: When was this? This was sometime in what, 60s or 70s then? LB: That would’ve been in the 60s--, early 60s or late 50s. LG: Yeah. LB: But anyway that was--. I had every job on there up to Executive Officer. But because of the limited number of people that were in that program, if you’d ever been in gunnery, you might as well figure you were going to do that, because what you had was an ensign who had just finished school up in Rhode Island, Newport, and so your fingers �Leroy H. Baker 54 were kind of all over there. And the captain was, kind of expected that somewhat. And I enjoyed that, anyway. I’d like to get back again with the CIC people, and the watch standers, and the gunnery people. Always stayed away from the supply. Stayed in good--. LG: I’m surprised they let you do that with your background in accounting. LB: Well, I had opportunities in that area, too, but I didn’t, that wasn’t what, that was my civilian career. That was not my military, although it was helpful. So, that was a great thing, and actually, that was, that program was closed on the DE-679. Oh, it was transferred to Pensacola. To Pensacola. And it was replaced by another four forty-fiveclass destroyer, and when this came along, by the time this thing came along, I was approaching retirement anyway. LG: Yeah. LB: And I said I don’t want to get involved with this again. You know, I’ve got a career over here that, you know, by far takes up enough of my time now. And actually, that ship got picked up to, restored to what you would call full time active duty and was called back during one of the crises for ten months. LG: Yeah. LB: Well, I--, you know, that would’ve suited me fine, but I couldn’t do that at that point at Westvaco. I had gotten so involved with that job, ’cause we serviced everything. All of our, what we call chemical division, which work with the byproducts, byproducts being all the chemicals you use and this, that, and the other thing that goes into this magic blend that you make paper from, right? LG: Right, everything that comes out of that. LB: Yeah, including the stack discharge, which we’re doing better with, certainly �Leroy H. Baker 55 now than we did back in those days. So, I didn’t get on that, but another fellow jumped in right behind me and did that. LG: Yeah. LB: And he got, we went back for ten months. LG: That would’ve been maybe around the Cuban Missile Crisis time then? LB: Yeah, that’s it, yeah. LG: So, that would’ve been late sixty-two into sixty-three then probably. LB: Yes, that was it. LG: Yeah. So, you went then for another twenty years with Westvaco and retired? LB: Thirty-one years. LG: Okay, thirty-one years. That would take you up into the, you said eightyseven? LB: Yeah. LG: Okay, eighty-seven. And what did you do after retirement? Did you have another job that you went, did you get to travel a little bit or--? LB: We did a lot of that. We did a lot of that. Our families were expanding and getting married. I have a son and a daughter. And my son going, went to, who had been divorced, remarried. Our daughter married. And then grandchildren came along. And we traveled a lot. My wife never cared about overseas travel, so I never went back to the scenes of the past. But I had had the scene from WWII, and I had had the scene from when we came back around that way from Korea. And now I get the modern day scene. But we did a lot of traveling and we had a ship’s reunion group. And we were, of course, wound up with the top job in that. And, along with that we had a ship’s reunion up until �Leroy H. Baker 56 three years ago. And of course, by that time, the veterans from WWII on that ship were pretty well gone, and the others were diminishing, also. LG: Yeah, what about with The Citadel? Have you kept any kind of relationship with The Citadel? LB: Not really as closely as I probably, I’d say should have but could have. When I was employed there, I was in the various societies, levels of giving and so on, so forth. But, after I retired, I kind of, I sort of got out of that. And about all I did is season tickets to the football games and basketball games. And I kept in touch with some of the faculty. But other than that, the homecoming, and that was about it. I never got, I never could--. After I retired from Westvaco, I sort of retired from the other. LG: Yeah, from all the other things, too. Yeah. LB: Yeah. I did. Of course, a number of people, what was the Marine colonel’s name? He lives right around the corner here. I can never remember his name. LG: Joseph Goodson is a Marine colonel. He may be the only one that I know, but he lives over in Mt. Pleasant. LB: Right, but the one preceding him. You know--, LG: I don’t know. LB: --gosh, I talked to him four days ago, and I can’t remember his name. This is what February the third did to me, plus the age. You know, I’ll go to sleep tonight and this’ll all come back to me, come together perfectly, you know, well-organized. And I wake up and it goes disorganized. LG: You don’t have to be your age to suffer from that. I’ll tell you, there are days when I look around and wonder, what in the world am I doing, you know? And I haven’t �Leroy H. Baker 57 had a stroke either, so, but--. LB: Well, I thank the good Lord for the stroke; I caught that on schedule because it would’ve been terminal. LG: Yeah, yeah. LB: It would’ve been terminal because of the fact that I had, and here again, a most unusual case and recovery. My recovery process required some technical, some techniques that are rarely ever practiced to keep me here. Because I had, you know, the problem, carotid artery problem. Plus it had become the name about that long. And then the surgery where you come off from a blood thinner called Coumadin, and you do the surgery, and then you go back on the Coumadin. And that transition to come back on it, it was a medical error made there. And I don’t talk about that. And so, instead of it being a normal situation, it reversed itself to where my body, actually upper body, turned blue on the transition medication they gave me. Was not the usual one that, and that may have been my age and my condition that they put me on that one, as opposed to Coumadin, which is what you’ve been on for, Lord since knows how long. And that really became a complicated mess. I was, as a matter of fact, it got so bad, I had to, I went in the hospital three times. And the second time I went in, the only way they could keep me literally from bleeding to death was to do a plasma transfusion. Which they did, a five bagger. And you can’t go any more than five. I was a five bagger. So, that got me, got the hemorrhaging stopped. Well, during this, and then I had to go back again. I had to go back again for some correctional work. So, there was a period of time there for about two months that I was pretty well, and still am, I just got out of the swim of all the, mostly specialists, unfortunately. It’s, you have a primary care who, you know, gets your blood �Leroy H. Baker 58 drawn and that sort of thing, but those specialists. And, I’m just glad to be here, I’m delighted. LG: You look like you’ve recovered pretty well. LB: Boy, I’ll tell you what. But you know, then cap it off I fell backwards. I fell backwards and fractured two ribs, one on both sides. And damaged my right, my left lung and my right kidney. So, here I go back through the system again. I sat down in the chair in my office that wasn’t there. But what was there was a desk that my computer’s on. And it doesn’t have beveled edges, it has ninety degree, LG: Just a sharp edge, yeah. LB: --and the chair that I missed is sitting over here. And you know how three, those five legged chairs are. They have these arms extending out. So, it’s on my right. So, as I went to sit down, the chair was over here, the computer desk was here, so this side raked the computer desk with its ninety degree angle. And I’m still feeling a lump where the ribs recovered, this rib. And of course the lung, I still have some residual problems with that, but it’s A-ok. And the right went down and hit the leg. LG: On the chair. LB: On the chair, metal chair. So, here I go again. LG: Yeah. LB: But I’m, you know, I take nourishment, I live by myself. LG: Yeah. Well, like I said you look great, you look like you’re doing--. LB: Well, I lost twenty pounds. And the thing about it is, is that the truth of the matter is for my age, if I were only sixty-five, physically, I could not feel any better. Yesterday, for instance, I’m re-doing the front flower beds at that over a period of time. �Leroy H. Baker 59 My wife was in a nursing home for seven years. And I took care of her. So, wherever--, well, wheelchair bound, I took her to concerts, I took her to church, I took her to the Battery, I took her to special events all over, and in that process, I did some damage to my basic bone structure. It’s now not very accommodating. But, so, including that, and in that process, a lot of things--. I always did all my own work. I loved it. Old farm boy. And my oak, I planted those oak trees out there, kept up the back yard, tried to do front yard, got away from me. I engaged a service to do the yard. First thing they did is came in and unintentionally sprayed my yard and killed my centipedes grass. That is, that in itself at the present time, is a problem, because they are fighting a suit that, in the long run’s going to cost them more than to replace the lawn. LG: Just put the lawn back, yeah. LB: But I think they finally see the light. So, that’s scheduled for the spring, since it’s this late now. LG: Yeah, yeah, put that in. LB: But yesterday, I went out and shrubbery, some of my shrubbery had, when they put the roof on, I had two Mexicans that fell into the shrubbery from the roof. And he took, they’ve fallen in the same shrubbery, it’d been the same. They, two, and the both of them died. I mean the shrubbery. Oh, hell, they went back on the ladders and went back to work. But they were kind of scratched up. I got some Band-Aids for a couple of them. But anyway, so I’m replacing that. And I went to bed last night, and I was very tired. Slept well, got up this morning, and you know, I don’t ache. LG: Yeah, well I’ll tell you--. LB: Now, my arthritis is eating me up, but that comes along with the aging �Leroy H. Baker 60 process. LG: Yeah, sure it does. Well, I think I’ve asked you about everything that I can think of to ask. Is there anything that we’ve missed that you can think of? LB: Well, no, but I appreciate very much being included in the survey group. I do. I feel honored. LG: Yeah. Well, I tell you, I think it is an honor, and I think it’s worth recognizing the work that people have done over the years. And certainly Citadel graduates, you know, as a group, have done a lot. LB: They gave me a career I never dreamed I would have. LG: Yeah, there you go. All right, well, let me wrap this up then and we’ll finish up. END OF INTERVIEW Verified LAG, November 21, 2010 GV, February 7, 2012 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource The oral histories in this collection were produced by The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel. Founded in 2008, The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel seeks to deepen understanding of the Lowcountry’s rich history and culture through the gathering and presentation of recorded memories from area residents.<br /><h3>Search Tips</h3> Interviews may be browsed by scrolling to the bottom of this page and selecting "View all items".<br /><br />When using the search bar, we recommend putting quotations around your search term, and selecting the Boolean search option, as illustrated here:<br /><p><img src="https://gdurl.com/aYPj" alt="aYPj" /><br /><br />To view interviews of a specific theme, please see the search tips in each series below.</p> <h3><strong>The Citadel in War and in Peace<br /></strong></h3> With generous support from the <a href="http://www.schumanities.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Humanities Council of South Carolina</a>, The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel collected thirty interviews with Citadel alumni regarding their experiences during WWII. Journalist and historian Jack Bass conducted the interviews during the Fall of 2008.They serve as a powerful testament to the veterans' experiences and their critical contributions to the war effort.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /><ul><li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- World War II"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Korean War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Vietnam War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- The Second Gulf War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- The War in Afghanistan"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Working Charleston</strong></h3> Working Charleston documents the on and off job experiences of the longshoremen and lawyers, the bartenders and carriage drivers, hospital aides and high tech workers who make Charleston among the nation's prime tourist destinations and vital centers of global trade.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /><ul><li>"Working Charleston"</li> <li>"Charleston City Workers"</li> <li>"Lowcountry Foodways"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement</strong></h3> <span><span>These interviews explore how community activism continues to shape modern life in the South.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /></span></span> <ul><li>"Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement</li> <li>"Civil rights movement--South Carolina"</li> <li>"African Americans--Civil Rights--South Carolina--Charleston"</li> </ul><a target="_blank" href="https://citadeldigitalarchives.omeka.net/items/show/193" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a> <h3><strong>Las Voces del Lowcountry</strong></h3> <span><span>This project is designed to raise the profile of the Hispanic/Latinos who call the Lowcountry home and to promote a rational and humane conversation regarding immigration, education, and employment policies.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:<br /></em></span></span> <ul><li>"Las Voces del Lowcountry"</li> <li>"Latin Americans--Southern States"</li> <li>"Hispanic Americans--Southern States"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Women in World War II</strong></h3> <em>*To search this series, type "Women in World War II" into the search bar, using the Boolean search option.<br /></em> <ul><li>"Women in World War II"</li> <li>"Women--Employment History"</li> <li>"World War, 1939-1945--Participation, female"</li> </ul> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Larry A. Grant Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Leroy H. Baker Jr. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 2 hours, 12 minutes Location The location of the interview Charleston, South Carolina Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral History of Leroy H. Baker Jr., interviewed by Larry A. Grant, 15 September, 2010 Subject The topic of the resource United States Strategic Bombing Survey Korean War, 1950-1953--Personal narratives, American World War, 1939-1945--Aerial operations, American Bombing, Aerial Description An account of the resource Baker was born November 2, 1924, in Tuckahannock Township, Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Citadel class of 1948. He served in WWII in the European Theater and remained in Europe after the surrender to serve on the US Strategic Bombing Survey team. When that duty concluded, he was sent to Charleston for release from active duty. There he decided to attend The Citadel as a veteran student. While at school, he remained in the Navy Reserve, and when the Korean War began, he was recalled to active duty. He was assigned to the destroyer, USS Porter (DD-800), where he served as gunnery officer. After Korea, he continued in the Navy Reserve and completed twenty years of service. Baker discusses his naval service in Europe, in destroyers, in Korea and his civilian career. After his release from active duty after Korea, Baker settled in Charleston, where he worked for the Westvaco Company until retirement in 1987. He lives in Charleston, SC, West of the Ashley. <br />Amidst rising border tensions, troops from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, and nearly drove US and Republic of Korean forces into the sea. Aided by United Nations soldiers, American troops led an amphibious counterattack at the port of Inchon on September 15, 1950, and a breakout from Pusan that swept north over the length of the Korean peninsula and reached the border of the People's Republic of China along the Yalu River in November 1950. Fearing invasion, Chinese forces crossed into North Korea and drove the UN forces south. After hard fighting by both sides, a stalemate developed in late 1951 around the 38th parallel. With military and material support from the US and the USSR, the war continued until July 27, 1953, when the warring parties agreed to an armistice. No permanent peace has ever been negotiated. Following up on its efforts to record the memories of World War II-era alumni, The Citadel Oral History Program began interviewing Korean War veterans in the spring of 2010. Several thousand Citadel alumni were on active duty during the Korean War, and at least 25 lost their lives in combat. These interviews cover a wide range of Korean-era experiences, including the Inchon landing, naval forces, Chinese intervention, and the eventual stalemate. They are a testament to the sacrifices made by the veterans whose lives and service have often been overshadowed by World War II. The digital recordings and transcripts are part of The Citadel Oral History Program Collection at The Citadel Archives &amp; Museum.<br /><br /><h3><strong><a target="_blank" href="http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:23453" rel="noreferrer noopener">Listen to the audio on the Lowcountry Digital Library.</a></strong></h3> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Korean War The Citadel in War and in Peace -- World War II The Citadel in War and in Peace Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Citadel Archives & Museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-09-15 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Materials in The Citadel Archives & Museum Digital Collections are intended for educational and research use. The user assumes all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of copyright. For more information contact The Citadel Archives & Museum, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, 29409. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context https://citadeldigitalarchives.omeka.net/items/show/181 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Charleston (S.C.)