 TRANSCRIPT OF Interviewer: Rita Pearce, a graduate student of the Elliott School of Communication at the Wichita State University. Interviewer: Today is Thursday, July 2nd, 1998. The time is 2:30 p.m. I am Rita Pearce, a graduate student of the Elliott School of Communication at the Wichita State University. This afternoon, I am interviewing Herman Crawford, otherwise known as Ike Crawford as a resident of Larksfield Place. Larksfield Place is a retirement community in Wichita, Kansas. The interview is taking place in a lounge area outside Mr. Crawford’s apartment, W-318. This interview is being conducted as a part of the I, Witness to History program. Mr. Crawford, will you tell me about your childhood? Crawford: Well, I was born in Sumner County. That’s the one just south of Wichita here—the adjoining county. The doctor didn’t really get there on time, but he said that Grandmother did a great job. My early childhood was on the farm there. I went to a country school through the fourth grade, which was a mile and three-quarters from our home, so I walked to school. I had an older cousin that lived with us at the time, so I didn’t really make the trip alone. But, kids these days won’t hardly walk across the street. Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: We walked all the time. They didn’t take us to school. We walked to school, and this was not the district that I was supposed to go to school in. That one was even farther away, so we had to pay tuition for me to go to school through the fourth grade. Interviewer: Was it significant for . . . Crawford: Oh, I don’t recall that it was. It probably wasn’t or we couldn’t have paid it. Interviewer: OK. Crawford: My Dad was constantly working for consolidation of this school with the larger one and finally got this done. By the time I was in the fifth grade, I started to school in the little town known as Anson, which is gone now. They hauled us to school in a horse-drawn vehicle that looked quite a bit like a stagecoach. The school did this for several routes to the school. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: We were really first class because this vehicle we rode in had glass windows that pulled up and down. The other kids rode in what we called "kidwagons." They were more like covered wagons with a canvas top. The wagons were stocked with comforts and hay to keep the kids warm goin’ to school. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: So, we were kind of livin’ it up with this glass affair that we rode to school in. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: I went to school at the little town of Anson through the eighth grade, and then after that, I went to high school in Belle Plaine, which was only about 12 miles away from our farm. Interviewer: How did you get there? Crawford: Well, again, in those days--this was in 1926 when I started to high school there, and things were a lot different than they are now. Four miles was a long way. Interviewer: Oh, yes. Crawford: You didn’t just take off, you know. A kid’d have a car today and drive 12 miles and think nothing of it, but one of the first years I went to school, I roomed with an aunt on a farm outside of Belle Plaine, and walked another couple of miles into Belle Plaine to school. But the last three years, I roomed with a lady that lived right back of the high school where I could almost hear the bell ring, and then still make it to school before it quit. Interviewer: (Laughs.) Crawford: And, sometimes did. So I graduated from high school there in 1930. And there was only 35 in our graduating class, and they had a reunion there once a year, but most of us after a while don’t go but ever five years. They make special recognitions for five-year classes, and I’ve been back to my 65th anniversary, and out of the 35 in our class, we’ve had eight that has made it quite regularly for the last several years. There are others that’s still alive, which is pretty good after 65 years really, but I got out—I didn’t go last year because it was not a fifth year. I’ll go in the year 2000 again, god willing, and, but I got a letter from one of the girls who did attend, and there was—there were five there this year. I didn’t go because it wasn’t my time. Another one was ill to the point that he couldn’t make it, and one who was there at the 65th had died since then, so, you know, when you graduate from high school and 65 years later, you got to be in those 80s, and a lot of people don’t make that. And then, in the summer I went back to the farm, which I detested. I didn’t care very much about the farm. And very little money in those days, and I had no hopes of bein’ able to go to school somewhere after high school. Interviewer: Now that was during the depression and the dust bowl came along beyond that? Crawford: Yeah. Yeah, the stock market crash was in ’29, of course. And well, we didn’t have a lot of money in the stock market. Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: The bottom dropped out of everything at that time. I can remember when on the farm, we raised wheat on an upland farm, and there was no commercial fertilizer at the time. All the fertilizer you got, you dug out of the barn, and this was pretty hard to deal with, so, it was an upland farm and no fertilizer and 12 bushels to the acre was a pretty good crop really. And we just got word the other day that on a farm we own in Sumner County now it made 50 bushels this year. Interviewer: Oh, my! Crawford: And, at that time we were getting’ 25 cents a bushel, and, now we’re sayin’ makin’ 50 bushels to the acre but it isn’t worth anything. But it’s worth about $2.59, which is considerably more than 25 cents. So things on the farm were just plain discouraging at that time and I’m sure that by the time I spent one more summer at home, showin’ very little interest in what was goin’ on, my dad told Mother, "Hey, we gotta do somethin’ with this kid. He aint never goin’ to make it on the farm." Interviewer: (Laughs.) Crawford: And, so we found out I could go to business college and just sign a note for tuition, and then start payin’ on this when I finished school. Interviewer: Much like today’s student loans? Crawford: Yeah. And I had to—well, I got a job in a restaurant—a little place back down in the alley from the business college. Interviewer: And the business college was located where in Wichita? Crawford: At that time, it was located in the first block of North Market. Interviewer: OK. Crawford: And Miller Theater was on Broadway, and Kress’s was on the corner where the empty Kress Building is now, and this little restaurant was back down the alley. Not a particularly prominent spot for a restaurant, but they got the—well, I remember there was a colored doorman that everybody just thought a lot of that worked at the Miller Theater. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: But he couldn’t eat. He went in this little joint back on the alley, but he’d come down there and get a meal and take it out or maybe eat back in the kitchen where I washed dishes. Interviewer: Uh-huh. Crawford: And I got, got my meals for workin’ there. For three hours a day, I got three meals, but the meals were not particularly big meals, because I think about the best thing they had was a—well, it was pretty good—a hot beef or hot pork sandwich or somethin’ like that and maybe a piece o’ pie. But I worked there for my meals and the folks worked their tails off raisin’ money to pay my rent, which was probably two dollars and a half for a week for a room, and I’d go home over the weekend, and Mother would fix up a bunch of stuff and did my laundry. So we kept everything as simple as we could and just cheap as we could, and I finally—well, not only did I work at the restaurant, but in order to help out a little bit with cash expenses, I started carryin’ a paper route, also. Interviewer: Oh, did you? Crawford: So, I was just get back from workin’ at the restaurant during the noon hour and I’d have to leave in an hour or so to carry my paper route. So I missed out on a lot of my accounting work, which they did in the afternoon. It took me a little longer to make it through school because of that. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: And so I’d go back after the paper route, and I finally got rid of it because you—I was carryin’ the Beacon and it was 15 cents a week at that time. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: And folks actually—they—I had an awful poor route. O’ course, I didn’t know much about the town, but I had Washington and I had through where old town is now. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: And there was a—there was a casket company in there. And the Beacon only had an evening paper except on Sunday. And there was just somethin’ about goin’ by that, because we’d start out on Sunday morning at four o’clock in the morning and most of these streets Santa Fe, Mosley, and some of those up through there--from the railroad tracks up to Washington was where my route was. And it was a terrible route, but as a matter of fact, they paid a bonus on it because you just couldn’t hardly collect. People’d get five weeks behind and move. They’d move to keep from payin’ the paper bill. And, I couldn’t make any money on it, but before, we had to put up a, a bond, and before we could get out of the paper route, we had to find somebody else to take it, and anybody that was smart enough to carry papers was too smart to take my route (laughs). Interviewer: (Laughs). What did you do? Crawford: So I went home one time though and I was carryin’ extras because they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t cut your draw, they called it. When you’d tell ‘em, "Hey, I’ve got some stops." But we had to pay for the papers we got, whether somebody was takin’ it or not. Interviewer: Right. Crawford: And one time I’d gone home and had some extras and I took a paper with me and my dad had picked it up, read the headlines, and I said, "You know I read those this morning by the headlight on a train." And, he said, " You what?" And I told him again and he said, "I want to come up and go along that route with you." Because it did go—there were some trains that went up—well, it’s where Olde Towne is now—up in through there. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: So Dad came up and saw what kind o’ conditions I was carryin’ papers under and he said, "You get out of there as quick as you can." So, I finally got somebody to take over my route and got out o’ the paper business, and then, then, I got me a job (laughs) runnin’ a pool hall across the street from the business college. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: Well, I wasn’t runnin’ it, but I, I’d open it up in the morning, sweep out, brush off the table. That was back in the days when your pop was in bottles and they put it in a container with ice in it. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: So I’d clean out the pop container and get ready for the man to bring the ice and more pop and then I played pool for the house (coughs) if somebody came in. Interviewer: Were you good at it? Crawford: Ah, I got fairly good, and later incidentally, when things got better and I was married and had a home, I had a recreation room and bought a big snooker table for my recreation room. Interviewer: Would anybody play with you? Crawford: Oh, yeah, yeah. Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: But, I did have a friend that one time in the evening—well, a lot of the guys played pool as an entertainment and so I said, "Well, you want to shoot some pool?"" "Aw, I’m not goin’ over there to . . ." We’d go to my pool hall because it didn’t cost me even if I lost. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: If we was playin’ in the pool hall that I worked at, but it would cost him if I could beat him. That was the purpose of it. "I’m not goin’ over there. You’ve got your own cue, and you know everything about it. I’ll play you somewhere else." So we went to another pool hall, and I was pretty good, but I wasn’t really this good. But, he never made a ball. I made ever one of them, so (laughs) he decided it didn’t make that much difference where I was playin’. Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: But, anyway, finally, bustled through all of this and ended up graduating in the spring of 1932. And there just were no jobs available. Interviewer: From business college that would’ve been. Crawford: Yes. Yeah, I, I, I, looked every place, and they were supposed to help you get a job, too, and they couldn’t find anything, and they had a provision in your contract that said you can—well, I think it was six weeks after you quit goin’ to school, if you didn’t have a job and pay ‘em, well, the whole thing became due. Interviewer: Ooh! Crawford: Well, of course, we couldn’t face that, but there was a provision in your contract that said you could review any subjects that you’d had and graduated in without payin’ any tuition. Interviewer: Oh! Crawford: So, I took my six weeks and went home, and we still didn’t have a job, so I came back and started reviewing. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: Well, this was in the summertime and actually they weren’t so, so disgusted with puttin’ up with me in the summertime, because for training, they had six offices and they had to keep these offices—they had school all summer, but not near as many students in the summertime. Interviewer: Right. Crawford: And, they had these six offices that they were keepin’ open with hired help because they didn’t have anybody to do it. You know, there weren’t that many students in school. So they put me in the bank. I ran the bank and they didn’t have to hire anybody to do it that way, and, and we posted the records in the bank on an old Burrough’s posting machine. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: And I got pretty good at this and so finally one time along in the fall, why, the president of the business college called me up and said, "Hey, do you think you can run a posting machine well enough to hold down a job at the Fox-Vliet Drug Company?" It was a wholesale drug house. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: And, I said, "Hey, if I can’t, you never graduated anybody from there that could! I’ve been reviewin’ it all summer!" Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: So, I went out and made an application at Fox-Vliet, and they made no bones about it. There were two elderly ladies workin’ there runnin’ the posting machines and they were Catholic and gonna take—go into a convent and become nuns, and they made no bones about tellin’ me that, "Hey, you’re gonna do the work that these two ladies have been doin’" Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: " For that you’re gonna get $10.50 a week." And that was all, too. $10.50 a week. There wasn’t any such a thing as health insurance. We got no sick leave. We had no paid vacation. We got nothing for overtime—it was just $10.50 a week for 44 hours. Interviewer: For 44 hours? Crawford: And, the 44—we were supposed to work four hours on Saturday. But that was a big joke. We rarely ever got out of there at noon, and the 44 hours was made up if you started at eight o’clock in the morning. But the president and the vice-president and the big shots got there at eight o’clock in the morning and if you hadn’t already been there and had the mail opened and sorted, and distributed on their desks, why, they’d call in some of the ten guys that applied for the job when you got it, because they still didn’t have one probably. Interviewer: Oh, um-hmm. Crawford: So, things were not really too good although we lived cheap. Again, I was only payin’ two dollars and a half for my room. Incidentally, the lady that I roomed with just celebrated her 100th birthday a while back. Interviewer: Oh, she did! Crawford: And I went to see her on this occasion, but I’d eat breakfast at a little restaurant where I could get these big doughnuts for a nickel and a cup of coffee for a nickel, and Grant’s had a stand-up lunch counter and you could get a hot dog for a nickel and a root beer for a nickel and that was my lunch every day. It’s amazing that I ended up as healthy as I did (laughs). Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: The way I had to eat during those times, and then in the evening, we’d get that big meal and go to a restaurant up on North Main Street where we could get a meal for a quarter. And that included potatoes and gravy, meat, and a vegetable and bread and butter and a cup of coffee. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Do you remember what it was called—the restaurant? Crawford: No, I don’t. I can’t remember the name of it. Also, during, during the time that we were goin’ to school, a friend of mine that I’d gone to high school with at Belle Plaine, his dad didn’t want him to go to school any farther, so he raised chickens one summer, and his mother and sisters was not this opposed to it, and he got in a bunch of little chickens and raised chickens and got some money together and he went to business college the next year, and well, I’ve lost my train of thought, but. anyway. . . Interviewer: You were eating at that restaurant? Crawford: Yeah—he and I roomed together later, too. But he and I got a job workin’ at a restaurant before we finished school the two of us was workin’ at a restaurant just north of the business college on Market Street. And it was run by Arch McVicar, who was later the Register of Deeds for Sedgwick County, and his brother ran the McVicar’s Clothing Store, which was at the corner of Main and Douglas at that time. And so I didn’t a little bit of everything to get my way through school, but I finally . . . I worked for Fox-Vliet for four years, and during this time the office manager was on vacation one time and one of the vice-presidents came around to me and said, "Hey, we think the head bookkeeper is stealin’ our money." And he’d been awful good to me. I was just a kid and he had helped me get started in the business. Interviewer: The head bookkeeper or the vice-president? Crawford: The head bookkeeper. And I’d played bridge with he and his wife. As a matter of fact, I went with his wife’s sister for a while, and now then, I’ve got to find out how this guy’s stealin’ the company’s money. So I give it a little thought and finally figured out how I thought he was doin’ it and I could check on this whenever he’d leave the office—I’d go check on some invoices. They had an awful loose system that anybody could make it work if you wanted to steal their money. He’d, he’d go back into the vault at night and take some invoices that they’d accumulated during the day for cash orders, and put them back in the vault, and then in the morning I counted the cash. They thought this was a protection and added up these invoices, which they kept with no numerical control of because some people would put it on the books and the invoice then would go to a different place, but I got to thinkin’ that any, I believe, there’s people been comin’ in here that generally pay cash and when I add ‘em up and list ‘em the next morning, that invoice is not in there. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: So I started to lookin’ through the day, he’d go to the restroom or someplace and I’d go check what tickets was in there, and then the next morning, they’d be one or two missing, and if somebody’d come in and gotten eight or ten dollars worth, he probably was makin’—well, I’d been raised until I was makin’ $13.50 or somethin’ like that—but he was probably makin’ $20-some a week. Well, if you’d take out one invoice a day that’s worth ten bucks, you’re, you’re makin’ a lot more than your salary, you know. Interviewer: Right. Crawford: So I went to the vice-president and said, "Yes, you’re right. He’s stealin’ your money and there’s no way you’re ever gonna know how long he’s been doin’ it, or how much he’s takin’ but I know that he is." I told him how, so he fired him and he said, "Well, the office manager is gone and until he gets back, I’m gonna put you in charge." Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: He said, "And he may want to change it when he comes back." But he never did. Interviewer: Oh, he didn’t? Crawford: And in the meantime, came the month end and the books had to be closed out. And I had no knowledge of this at all. I’d been runnin’ my little posting machine and tyin’ in with the general ledger. But I was fresh out of school, and knew a little bit about accounting anyway, and I went back over the books to see what did they do the month before, and then if it was reasonable, I did it for that month, and I got the books closed out, and Wichita’s Fox-Vliet was the home office and they had another place in, in Oklahoma City and one in Pueblo. Interviewer: Colorado? Crawford: Yes, so then I get the reports from them and have to consolidate ‘em with mine and do a big report for the month. And, I got that worked out, so there was good reason why the boss didn’t ever change things, but he and I didn’t always see eye to eye, and we had a few words one time over me not—the Chamber of Commerce put on an income tax school and he, he mentioned it to me but there was a charge for that. And, I didn’t go and I talked to one of the vice-president’s sons and he said, "Well, unless you was already a tax man, it was over your head anyway." So one day the office manager said to me, "Well, I was a little disappointed that you didn’t go to that income tax school."" And I said, " Yeah, I can understand that, and I would’ve like to have gone. But I’m still payin’ tuition to the last school I went to, and I really couldn’t afford it and besides that Wayne Dixon told me that it was all over your head if you weren’t a tax man anyway. And he said, "Well, if you’re always gonna be afraid of somethin’ that’s over your head, you probably ought to look for a different field." And he said that to the wrong fellow. Because I was payin’ for a car up at GMAC, and I made a payment up there that day and asked ‘em about a job. Interviewer: And GMAC stands for? Crawford: GMAC—General Motors Acceptance Corporation. Interviewer: OK. Crawford: That’s the credit end of the General Motors Company. And so, I told ‘em, "Hey, don’t, if you want to do any checkin’ on me, don’t say anything to Fox-Vliet unless you’re gonna hire me ‘cause they’re gonna fire me if you do. And they said, "Yeah, we know about that, and we won’t until we’re ready to hire you," and it wasn’t long ‘til they said, "Hey, you can go to work anytime you want to." And I went back and told my boss, I said, "Hey, do you remember when you told me if I was gonna be afraid of things that was over my head, I oughta look for a new field? Well, I did and I found one." Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: "Now I can give you two weeks notice or I can go to work up there Monday." And, he said, "Oh, my. Two weeks won’t be a bit too much. You’re the last person in the world I ever thought was gonna quit." And I said, "You’d begin to act that way, too." And, so Mr. Fox came to me and told me that I was makin’ a big mistake, but I worked at GMAC then for—well, I got married just about the time I changed that in 1936. And I wasn’t makin’ but $90 a month for GMAC when I got married. Interviewer: OK, you’d been makin’ $10.50 a week when you started out. Crawford: Yeah, I’d gotten—I’d gotten up to where I was makin’ $22.50 after I got to be the head bookkeeper, but, at the time I left I was makin’ $22.50 a week as head bookkeeper. For a company that the president was getting 1400—the, the amount was easy to remember. I was also in charge of payroll and wrote the checks for ever’body and the old man that run the place was makin’ $1492 a month, and I was makin’ $22.50 a week (laughs). Plus the fact that he had a lot of stock that always paid good dividends. Interviewer: (Laughs). Uh-huh. Crawford: But anyway, then I worked at Fox-Vliet Drug Company until the war came, and they were startin’ to send people to Dallas and they had an interest in, in the North American in Kansas City. Interviewer: Now, is that--do you mean that’s still Fox-Vliet or do you mean . . . Crawford: No, no, GMAC. Interviewer: OK. Crawford: And they were transferring it to airplanes. North American was an airplane place that partly owned by General Motors. And my wife’s family and my family were still alive down in Sumner County and getting kind ‘o old, and we didn’t really want to leave Wichita, so I left and went out to Boeing and got a job keepin’ time. And they tried to talk me out ‘o that, too. Fortunately ever’ place I left, I left on my own, so I never missed a day’s work from the time I started until I finished. Interviewer: Now, you were workin’ at GMAC during hard times, as I understand it? Crawford: Yeah, I went to work there in 1936 in the accounting department, and I worked in the accounting department for four years, but they paid, they paid better money in the credit department. Finance people was just a necessary overhead that they didn’t think made ‘em any money. And but during the six years that I was there workin’ for GMAC, only three people ever had the opportunity to transfer from the accounting department to the credit department. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: And, one of those was the accounting manager, and he went from the accounting department over to finan—credit. And, I got this opportunity, and it paid better money, but I had had no experience at this at all, and they sent me out in to the field, and I headquartered out of Great Bend. Interviewer: Umm-hmm. Crawford: Well, at the time, Great Bend was a booming metropolis of oil industry, and there was absolutely no place to live. I looked and looked and had been rentin’ a house in Wichita for $20 a month, a five-room bungalow house on the West Side. And I couldn’t—there was no place, and they’d tell ya’ that in Great Bend, "Hey, we got no places to live." And so we stored our furniture in a bowling alley, in an old vacant bowling alley. And lived in a room for several months. Interviewer: At Great Bend? Crawford: At Great Bend, and I finally found a house that faced an alley and I found out that the old man that built the house had started to build a garage, and the places were so hard to find that people started to comin’ to him right away quick as he started doin’ some excavatin’ and wanted to rent the house. So he decided (laughs) this is not a bad idea and turned the garage into a house. Interviewer: Uh-huh. Crawford: And I managed to get all of it because the people that had rented it had not been payin’ the rent well, and by payin’ two months in advance and havin’ a pretty good background, well, we got a place to live finally. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: So I worked—worked in the field as a collection man, which I was not very good at. Interviewer: Why? Crawford: Well, I, I, thought ever’body was too honest. One of my, one of my supervisors in the office told me one time that whenever you realize that most of the people you’re doin’ business with is a scoundrel, you’ll get along better. You see, I’d go up and call on somebody and they’d say (ah, these people were experienced at this). They’d say, " Well, we got some money comin’—we’ll send a payment next week." Well, that’s fine—I wrote this on a report and mailed it in. But they didn’t send the money next week! Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: My supervisor said, "You know, don’t overlook the fact that they’ve already signed a contract—a piece of paper—and said I’ll pay this on such and such a date, which was 30 or 60 days before you were out there, or you wouldn’t o’ been there. Interviewer: Ah! Crawford: So then they already have not done what they said they would. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: But it was difficult for me to deal with people that I thought was havin’ a hard time. I called on one fellow one time, and he—this was in about, oh, maybe 1940, but he had a 1936 pickup that he’d bought new, and he’d renewed and renewed the account until he only owed $10.50 on this truck. Interviewer: That’s all that was left? Crawford: That’s all that was left, but somehow the papers got mixed up and they had not gotten with him soon enough so they told me to go out and collect that. Well, I went out to the place, and it was a, it was a tough lookin’ joint. There was absolutely—this was back in the dust bowl days, when all of the topsoil had been blowin’ off from it. The tops of the—well, the ground looked like the top of a table. And I went to this man and drove out to the field. He was out there and he said, "You’re probably the GMAC man." And, I said, "You got it!" "Well, it’s down there in the shed, and just go get it and take it with you." And, I said, "You gotta be kiddin’! You owe ten dollars and a half on it—that all I want is $10.50. "I haven’t got $10.50." And I said, "I’ll renew it for you—extend your contract. It’s worth a lot more money than that." And nope. And I said, "Why, haven’t you got chickens or cows?" He said, "Mister, I haven’t got anything that’s not mortgaged for more than it’s worth." And, I said, "How about this guy that’s here with you today—he’s over here to borrow somethin’ from you." And, he said, "I don’t think there’s $10.50 in Rush County!" And, I said, "There is today because the GMAC man is here! And I can’t take your truck for 10 dollars and a half. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll pay the $10.50, give you a receipt for it, and if you ever get it, send it to me, don’t send it to the company, because after today they’re not gonna think you owed anything, and I don’t really know how they feel about there man comin’ out here and payin’ somebody’s truck off." Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: And so I did. I paid him for it, and then, well, several months, I got a poorly scribbled letter in the mail one day, and he'd sent me $12. ‘Cause he wanted to pay me some interest on it and said it kind ‘o renewed his faith in humanity because he didn’t know there was any people left like that. Interviewer: Oh, my. Crawford: So all of my experiences in the field were not sad ones, although I had some very strange ones. Worse than this, and but then at the end of the war—well, at the beginning of the war, they, they started movin’ people out of GMAC, and so that’s when I went to work for Boeing. And I thought, GMAC was a good place to work, and I thought one d—when the war was over with, why, I’ll go back to GMAC, because I left under good terms, and but I was only at Boeing probably two years until I worked my way into management, and by the time the war was over, I was doin’ well enough at Boeing. I was in the finance department in charge of property accounting. Interviewer: And, property accounting—what did that entail? Crawford: Well, property accounting, we, to start with, we had the records on all the equipment—the office furniture, the typewriters, the chairs, the tables, the files, and all of the equipment in the plant—the lathes, the mills, and even the real estate. We had the records on when you bought it, what we paid for it, and where it was, that was supposed to be moved when it was written, to tell us when they was movin’ it, ‘cause we was supposed to be able to go to any of it, and there’s a lot of acres of plant out there. Interviewer: Wow, uh-huh. Crawford: So we had a crew of people who inventoried it, and then, later on, they expanded my field, and I, I still had the group of people that had this, but they gave me material records, was a group that was under me—with other supervision over it. So, at this point, I was only supervisin’ supervisors, but I had property records, material inventory, and government stores. They were four different groups that reported to me, and then later on, oh, from time to time, they’d change things and government stores went under the production department, because that’s the way it was done in Seattle, and I got, I took over surplus sales, and salvage, and this was interesting work to me, because it was somethin’ that I had no experience with or never did anything like that. But I worked there for 34 years, and retired when I was 63. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: In 1976. I belong to a retired manager’s club, and you know, I had a big mouth and everybody picked on me a little, and one of these dinners that we had, why, somebody hollered when I was in line for dinner and said, "Ike, how long have you been retired?" And, at that time I said, "Twenty years"—it’s been twenty-two now. And they said, "I don’t know how anybody could live so long!" (Laughs.) Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: But that’s about the, about the size of my history until I you only asked me to tell you about when I was young. I’ve brought you up all the way to an old man. And eight years ago, well, we’d built a house after I worked at Boeing for a while, we built us a house over in Riverside. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: And I lived there for forty-some years. And we’ve been at Larksfield Place now for eight years next month. Interviewer: Was it hard to leave your own home? Crawford: Yeah, yeah, it’s always hard to leave a place that you’ve been in for forty-some years, but we made the right decision. Interviewer: Did you? Crawford: Because you know, things are startin’ to happen to us a little bit now. I’ve been extremely healthy but last, last December, I stared havin’ a paralysis in my arms and legs and it took ‘em two months to find it, but finally turned out from an MRI, which I’d been strongly resistin’ because I’d had two of ‘em before, and they’re not the greatest things in the world when they roll you back in that thing for 45 minutes and leave you there with a lot of poundin’ but an MRI was finally what discovered that I had a ligament that was twisted around my spinal chord. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: And cuttin’ off my nerves. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: And, so I still have difficulty getting up and walkin’ and movin’ my hands, but for an old man of 85, I’m doin’ all right. Interviewer: Did they do surgery to correct that? Crawford: Yeah, yeah, I had surgery back there. They split me from about five inches down, from the top of my head down to my shoulder blades. Interviewer: Um-hmm. Crawford: Got in there and straightened out that ligament. Doctor said that I might—I could be showin’ improvement for as much as a year, but it seems to me like I’ve almost reached a plateau, and I may not be getting any better, but, but I’m not about to let it get me down because I can look around and see a lot of people in much worse shape than I am—I’m still movin’. Interviewer: Um-hmm, um-hmm. Did you and your wife have any family? Crawford: Never had any children. We were all set to adopt and about 1949, we had an appointment to go to Kansas City, as a matter of fact, for an interview to adopt children, and, at the same time, we got notice that my wife had tuberculosis. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: And so we went to Norton to check this out. The indication was it was TB. Interviewer: Norton, Kansas? Crawford: Yes, Norton was a TB center up there. Interviewer: Oh. Crawford: It turned out that after a good many months of treatment, most of which didn’t work on her, because the things they were doin’ at that time was still pretty primitive compared to today, you know. A lot of the drugs and things that we now have that’s almost wiped TB out were not available, and they were collapsin’ lungs, and givin’ ‘em bed rest and, and I was still workin’ at the time and I’d drive back and forth to Norton every other weekend, and it was a long, terrible trip really. Interviewer: How long was she there? Crawford: Oh, she was—she would o’ had to been there a lot longer if we’d o’ had children, but they finally decided that they’d let her go if she’d check in with the chest doctor here in Wichita, and it turned out that actually her TB was not in her lungs. She’d had a pleuralafusia back in 1939 and fluid formed on her lungs that they drained six times with a needle, and so they said if you don’t have any kids, we’ll let you go if you check in with the doctor in Wichita. And, it turned out that what she really had was; it was in her bronchial tubes. She had a tuberculous ulcer in her bronchial tubes, and the chest specialist here went into there and cauterized that six different times with what they called, well, I might o’ known I couldn’t think of it, but, well, a bronchoscope type thing that they’d go down in their with and got mirrors on it and they could look and it went way down into her bronchial tubes and he found this tuberculous ulcer and she had to go six times for this, and it was treated with somethin’ to cauterize it—burnt it to seal it over, you know. Interviewer: Is that like what they call laproscopic surgery? Just like that has the mirror involved in it and they can make a small incision and go internally and see what’s in there. Crawford: Yeah. Well, they just jammed this down her throat. Interviewer: Oh, did they? Crawford: Yeah, and a bronchoscopy—that’s what they called it. It was a bronchoscopy, and they, why, they used this same thing if a kid sucks a bean into his lungs or somethin’. They can go in there with this and find it, but he not only went in there and found it, but he treated it and got it to work. She could get a negative sputum, and when she got a negative sputum, then she could be released from this, but we both had to get chest X-rays ever’ so often—she, for a good many years. Then it finally got all right. Interviewer: Mr. Crawford, did you have any unusual characters in your family? Crawford: Yeah, my Uncle Walt was my favorite and that was probably because he was as honery as I was, but I enjoyed him. I used to work for him some as a teenager in the summertime on the farm. And we’d been puttin’ up hay at one time and ‘til the dust around the barn was—there was a real dry time, and they was just dust four or five inches thick and we had a sling that we’d put hay on, and then pull it up into the barn, a half a load at a time. And so one morning we’d been out to the barn milkin’ and the sill on the barn was pretty—pretty tall. And, I went up to the door with a bucket of milk in each hand, and there was a little—it wasn’t a Shetland pony, but it wasn’t a full-size ridin’ horse either that belonged to a kid down the road that they just kind o’ let it run around and eat wherever it wanted to, and it was up there, so I walked up to the barn door with my two buckets of milk and this horse was standin’ there and I got—it was right next to the sill and by me steppin’ upon the sill, I could throw my legs up over its back with out getting a hold of anything, so I thought, hey, Uncle Walt’ll think this pretty good, I’ll ride to the house with two buckets of milk. So I get on the horse with two buckets of milk and she still just stands there. Well, the rack wagon that we’d been haulin’ hay in was about three feet from the barn—maybe a little more than that, so I kicked the pony in the ribs to get her started and she spotted this distance between the rack wagon and the barn, which was room enough for her to go through, but it was hardly room enough for me to go through with two buckets of milk stickin’ out. Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: So she charges into this opening. I got two buckets of milk and get drug off into that dust three inches deep—with two buckets of milk poured all over me (laughs) and obviously I was quite a mess at this point, and my uncle got more out of that two buckets of milk than anything he had ever sold in this life because he thoroughly enjoyed this. Interviewer: (Laughs). So Uncle Walt was a character? Crawford: Oh, yeah, yeah. Uncle Walt—one time we were, we were headed into some maize with butcher knives where he’d cut it, but it was too wet down in there to get to it and we were choppin’ the heads off with a knife and throwin’ it in the wagon to clean up this wet place. And, it was right along a little spur of the Missouri-Pacific that probably had a train go through there twice a day—one goin’ down, and the other one goin’ back. And this field was right by that, and so, we heard a train whistle, and he said, "Aw, we don’t want them to see us out here workin’ like this, let’s get up in the wagon. We’ll lay down where they can’t see us. This is kind o’ demeaning work we’re doin’." So, we got up in the wagon and laid down on the cane—and, or the maize that we’d cut and the train blew the whistle about that time and the mules ran away (laughs) with the wagon and my uncle obviously had to stand up to try to get the runaways stopped (laughs) so it didn’t work too well." Interviewer: (Laughs). And, and speaking of the runaway, this is a different time but, oh, was workin’ for Dad at this point and I was usin’ a lister, which required to use some six horses, and we only had six draft horses that we used to work with. Well, I had an old buckskin pony, and Dad had a long-legged mare that he rode, so he decided that he’d hitch these two up, which were not used to workin’ as a team at all, and, and fix some fence, and so he’d pieced together some old harness, which were not very good, and harnessed up this team and hooked 'em to a wagon and put two barrels of water in the back of it, ‘cause it was extremely dry and the ground was hard, and he was gonna try to dig post holes with an old post auger, and he could dig down about eight inches or somethin’ like that, then he’d fill it up with water, and go on to another one. And when the water’d soak up maybe he could dig it a little deeper. So I heard him a cussin’ and hollerin’ at these horses and had this old long-legged mare had always been a balker. And the old buckskin pony had never really worked like that before, but he caught on awful quick. And I looked down there and Dad’s tryin’ to get ‘em to go and they’re balkin’. A balky horse, you can’t make ‘em move, and so he (laughs) he’s hollerin’ and swearin’ at ‘em and pretty soon I saw him out pullin’ up dead grass, and I knew what was gonna happen, so I stopped my team. I was workin’ kind o’ up on a hill and I stopped to just watch this. He gathers a bunch of grass up and sticks it under this old mare and got it on fire, jumped into the wagon, (laughs) and right after a balk, he got a runaway, and they’d take off across the lister wedges that I’d had with two barrels—open barrels of water in the back and the water flyin’ up in the—and I’m just layin’ on the ground (laughs) dyin’ o’ laughin’ up there. One minute he’s tryin’ to get ‘em to start, (laughs) and the next, he’s tryin’ to get ‘em to stop. Interviewer: (Laughs). Crawford: But lots of interesting things can happen to you on a farm. Interviewer: Um-hmm. So you enjoyed part of it, but it was not something that you . . . Crawford: Yeah, it was not my way (laughs) of makin’ a livin’. Interviewer: Well, it’s certainly sounds like you had a productive life. If you had a moral of your life that you think helped you get through it, what would it have been? Crawford: Always be honest. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, just face it with honesty and it’ll work out. Interviewer: OK. I’ll try to remember that. Thank you for your time today. I’ve enjoyed this oral history and many other people will appreciate hearing about it, too. Crawford: Well, its kind o’ good for us to recall a few things once in a while—while we can still remember somethin’. Interviewer: (Laughs). Right, thank you. Copyright
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