This continues the second installment of the saga of cousin Bill Llewellyn from the interview with him in 2004 by Rutgers University.
Me with Cousin Bill Llewellyn at their home in March 2011 in Hilton Head Island, SC
All my family [members] were Quaker. I just don’t know much about … going farther back, … except that I do know that my great-grandfather was involved with building [the] Barnesville School in Barnesville. I think they moved west … as the roads opened up from the North Carolina region, but I’m not sure, and then, I know, … later, in my great-grandfather’s lifetime, why, the road opened up further and he moved on out to Iowa, where there are a lot of Quaker, or Friends, communities. … Then, after his wife died out there, he came back to Barnesville and my grandfather … was one of these guys that was an excellent mechanic and craftsman, but he didn’t want to be management. … The minute he’d begin to get a little too much responsibility, why, he’d move. … In the late, I think when my mother was a little girl, so, it would have been, when was she born? about 1882 or something like that.
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SH: You wrote 1880 on the pre-interview survey.
WL: Yes, so, it must have been about 1890 and ‘91, when she was ten or eleven, … my grandfather took a job in Lake Elsinore, … California, and they went [out west]. … She said they went by train to Los Angeles, and then, they went by stagecoach from Los Angeles down to Lake Elsinore. … He was a patternmaker and machinist in a pottery works there. … She tells stories, [such as], her mother would never let the girls leave without the dog they had, because the dog would kill rattlesnakes, and so, she always kind of loved the desert from that experience. I think they were there maybe five or six years, and then, my grandfather went back to Ohio again, … but he ended up going out [to California again] and he retired, eventually, in Pasadena, died there in 1940, I think. … So, he had a little wanderlust in him. [laughter]
SH: The West was opening up at that point, which must have been very attractive to them. WL: Yes, yes.
SH: I would like to talk about your education before Barnesville, starting with your elementary school education.
WL: Yes. Well, I had three years or four years of elementary school in Cheltenham, right outside of Philadelphia, and then, we moved to Plainfield. … I was [in the] sixth, seventh and eighth grades in Plainfield. So, I had five years in Philadelphia. [laughter]
SH: Was Cheltenham a public school?
WL: Yes, that was a public school. No, I didn’t go to a Friends school until high school, which is what we all did.
SH: That was just for the one year.
WL: No, then … four years.
SH: You stayed there for four years.
WL: Well, one year at Barnesville, and then, three years at Westtown, right outside of Philadelphia, near Westchester, which is where I graduated [from].
SH: Your family was living in …
WL: Plainfield.
SH: You just went down to Philly for school.
WL: Yes, yes.
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SH: How often did you return home?
WL: Not too often. …
SH: Did your family come down to see you?
WL: Of course, when my sisters went to Westtown, we were living in Cheltenham, so, they saw them quite frequently, but [I went home] on just vacations. … Well, in my senior year, I messed that up by [virtue of the fact that] I fell in love with a girl in my junior year and was kind of rejected and my teeth needed straightening. … It wasn’t terrible, but it was an overbite there that I was very aware of. So, I went home and, … in the end of my junior year, I told my parents [that] I wanted my teeth straightened. So, my father said, "Okay." So, I went to Dr. Minez who had offices in Plainfield and Newark and New York City, I think, and got started that summer, and then, I had to come home quite frequently for adjustments during my senior year, and then, I got the damned braces off … before I went to Rutgers. [laughter] During the summer before I was a freshman at Rutgers, I still had the braces on and a couple of guys came from the DKE [Delta Kappa Epsilon] House looking for pledges and I never heard from them again, after they saw me with braces on. [laughter]
SH: You did not fit the image.
WL: No, no. [laughter] …
SH: As a high school student, what were your keen interests? Were you on a certain path? Did you know that you would be going on to college?
WL: Oh, yes, we always [knew]. … Yes, from [the time we were] little kids on, it was [expected that] we were going to go to college.
SH: Really?
WL: Yes, and, of course, my parents never had. My mother graduated from high school. My father had two years [of high school], and then, he’d gotten most of his education after that, I think, in correspondence classes. … He was just a good, hardworking, honest guy. …
SH: Education was very important to them.
WL: I ran into a guy at Rutgers one time and he heard my name and he said, "Do you have a father at Merck’s?" or something, and I said, "Yes, that’s my father," and he kept looking at me. He said, "He was quite a guy." … I could see him sizing me up, wondering whether I was like my father, and I’m not too much [like him]. [laughter] I take more after my mother’s, the Frame, side of the family, I think. [laughter]
SH: It is interesting that he knew your father.
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WL: Yes. He’d worked at Merck’s for my father, as I recall. I just remember the long look he gave me as much as anything else. [laughter]
SH: Did both of your sisters go on to college as well?
WL: Yes. The one sister graduated, my sister Ruth, who was; let’s see, I was Class of ‘37 at Westtown, she was ‘31, so, she was six years older than I was, and then, … my oldest sister was seven years older. She was the Class of ‘30 at Westtown. That’s the way little kids figure this out, from their older sisters. [laughter] … My father felt that girls should be able to type or do something like that. So, they went to, was there a Drake College or something? I think, [for] stenographic [courses], typing and shorthand, and they went there for six months or so, after they got out of Westtown, and then, worked as a secretary for a while. … Then, Esther went two years to NJC [New Jersey College for Women, now Douglass College] and they commuted from Plainfield, and then, my sister Ruth went four years. She got her degree in chemistry at NJC and, also, had the typing and shorthand thing. … So, when I got out of Westtown where my father said, "You know, I spent a lot of money on you. You can go to college near home," [laughter] and I said, "Okay, but I don’t want to commute. I want to live there." So, he said, "All right." So, I always lived there and my oldest sister resented [the] hell out of it. [laughter] My younger sister didn’t mind too much. … My oldest sister always said I was spoiled rotten and got anything I wanted. [laughter]
SH: I think that is normal. [laughter]
WL: Yes. So, they had two and four years, and then, I was in [Rutgers].
SH: What did your sister do with her chemistry degree, at that time?
WL: Yes. Well, she got a job as a secretary to the head of research, I forget where, at Western Electric or something like that. … She got a job as a secretary to somebody, to a scientific type, yes, and used it that way.
SH: I am interested in discovering where women found employment in those days, particularly one who graduated with a chemistry degree during the depths of the Great Depression.
WL: Yes, yes.
SH: Did you apply anywhere else or was it a foregone conclusion that you would go to Rutgers?
WL: No, I didn’t apply anywhere else. I wanted to take mechanical engineering and Rutgers had a good engineering school. …
SH: You had known in high school that you were heading towards engineering. WL: Yes, yes.
SH: Was your coursework geared toward that field of study?
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WL: No, no. I mean, it was just college prep. … As a matter-of-fact, … my sophomore year at Rutgers, I was feeling so left out of anything but just technical crap that I took an elective in … Middle English literature or something like that and there were only about eight or ten guys in the class. … It was a study of some of these authors or writers … after Shakespeare, in that area someplace. … So, I remember the first day and the guy who was teaching it said, "Well, you know, what’s your major?" and I said, "Mechanical engineering." "What in the hell are you doing here?" you know, [laughter] because my contemporaries in engineering were taking an extra math course or something like that. I just didn’t want it. I never considered myself a very good technical engineer. I’m a better "catalogue" engineer. … When a problem comes up, I look around [and say], "I wonder who knows something about this," whereas some guys I worked with, [when] a problem comes up, they say, "Oh, boy, this is just what I want," and they start solving it themselves and I never took that attitude. [laughter]
SH: You graduated from high school in the 1930s.
WL: ‘37, yes.
SH: How did the Great Depression affect you, economically? You said that you knew that you were headed for college. Many people found that difficult to do at that time.
WL: Yes. Well, I was lucky that way, because, as I say, my father went with Merck’s and Merck’s prospered during the Depression, as they have since, but their big item, during the worst part of the Depression, was, what is the Vitamin? What did you get from cod liver oil?
SH: D?
WL: "D," I think. Well, they made it synthetically and were the first ones to be able to do that. … They could still sell it almost for the price of being refined from cod liver oil and it paid for the whole damn operation, really. So, they prospered and my father was chief engineer and his
salary during the worst of the Depression was about five hundred dollars a month, which was very good pay in those days. So, we didn’t feel the Depression, really. I remember, I was a pretty good draftsman and they were looking for somebody to do some sort of work for the college and the head of the Drafting Department recommended me to do the work. … So, I went over. It was at some New Deal agency that paid for these kids doing this work around school.
SH: The NYA, the National Youth Administration.
WL: Yes, something like that, and I went … to sign up for the thing and I talked to the guy for a few minutes. He said, "I can’t give you a job." He said, "Your father makes too much money. I can’t do it." [laughter] So, I said, "Okay." [laughter] So, I was relatively well-off. … I knew about the Depression, but it didn’t affect me personally.
SH: Did you see its effects on others at home or in Philadelphia?
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WL: Oh, I saw it, yes, sure. I saw it all around me, sometimes. … [There was] a kid I lived across the street [from] in Plainfield and his father was, well, he was an older man, too. I think he … would have been in his late sixties, perhaps. I thought he was awfully old. It doesn’t seem very old now, [laughter] from the standpoint of eighty-four, but, anyway, … [the son was named] Donny (Smythe?) and Mr. Smythe worked on Third Avenue in New York, … in one of those antique stores, and he was quite an antique expert, but he got laid off and my father ended up buying his house. … He paid more than he had to, so that the Smythes could get something, and he could have just picked it up [cheap]. So, my father lived Quakerism. He tried to be fair to people, and so, then, [the] Smythes moved to a different part of town and I never saw Donny [again]. So, I was aware of the Depression and it affected a lot of people. …
SH: Did you work during the summers, when you returned home?
WL: Oh, yes. No, I always worked and at first, well, I had paper routes for a couple of summers. Somebody asked me [about this] the other day. … [The man] who was later my brother-in-law, [who] was [then] going with my sister, … worked in the circulation department for the Plainfield Courier News. So, he’d get me a summer replacement job for the paper route and I think I delivered about one hundred papers a day, … with a bike, obviously, and I think the pay was a dollar-forty-seven a week or something. [laughter] If you helped out loading the trucks, why, you got a dollar-sixty-five, and then, if you helped out loading, forty-seven [cents]. Then, you got about a dollar-ninety-five if you helped out some other way, for a week. So, I did that for two or three years, and then, … I wanted physical labor. So, my father got me jobs. Well, the first one was as office boy for the American Chimney Corporation in New York City. … That would have been ‘36, when I was between my junior and senior year at Westtown, and that was in Union Square on 14th Street, New York. So, I had to commute to New York, run to the ferry, and then, run off the ferry on the other side and get on the BMT [Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit] or the IRT [Interborough Rapid Transit] and go up to 14th Street. … I worked as an office boy there for a Mr. Walther who … owned and operated the company. … Just by chance, they were building a 225-foot chimney for Merck’s, which my father [had] ordered. So, obviously, that’s how I got the job, [laughter] but that’s when I decided I was never going to work in New York City. I’d see these guys commuting and, every night, they had their little set up with bridge and card and they played bridge on the rattley, old … New Jersey Central coming back. … So, I said, "No way. I will work anyplace but New York City when I get done," and I avoided it for a long time. [laughter] So, I did that each summer, and then, two summers, I worked for the Loizeaux Lumber Company in Elizabethport, New Jersey, and that was just stacking lumber and cement there and that was a great job. That was … before my freshman year and before my sophomore year [at Rutgers], when you want to build muscles anyway, if you’re a young guy. [laughter] … The owner/CEO of the company was Charles E. Loizeaux, a NJ State Senator at that time. Merck did a lot of construction during the ‘30s.
SH: Were you involved in sports in high school?
WL: Yes, yes. I played everything in high school. I was lousy at basketball, I was pretty good at baseball and … Westtown had soccer. … Some kid had been killed twenty or thirty years earlier playing football, and so, they decided they really didn’t have the kids who were big enough to field a football team. So, they dropped football and it was just soccer. So, when I got
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to Rutgers, the only thing I knew how to play was soccer. … Coach [G.W.] Dochat was trying to get soccer started at Rutgers when I arrived there. So, it was … not a varsity sport the first year or so, and then, they made it a varsity sport and the guys, at the end of the season in which we, I think, won one game and lost all the others, … elected me captain. … I forgot all about it, really, until, your coach now, at Rutgers, is [Robert] Reasso, yes, and he’s been very successful with his soccer program, and so, he kind of wanted to make [a showcase]. I think he’d been there twenty years in 2000 and he wanted [to highlight the program]. So, he had some … all-star teams or something like that, and then, he had a legacy team, which … went back to the beginning of soccer, and it turned out that I was the first captain of a varsity soccer team at Rutgers, and so, it shows up on all these lists, "William Llewellyn, first captain of a soccer team at Rutgers." So, I’ve had a lot of fun with that. Kids call me sometimes for a donation, you know, to the soccer program and I’ll say, "You know what? Do you know who you’re talking to?" I said, "You’re talking to the captain of the first varsity soccer team at Rutgers," and they go, "I didn’t know that," and then, I’d get a confirmation note and they say, "Yes, you were." … So, I’ve had a lot of fun with it [laughter] and I went up to Reasso’s celebration in mid-October, I guess, of 2000. … He had the all-legacy team there and we … had a golf game, and then, went to the soccer game in the evening and I got introduced and they were very kind. They said that I contributed to the start of Rutgers’ program, and with limited success. Boy, it was limited, all right, you know. [laughter] We didn’t win anything but just one.
SH: One game is a start, right? That is fun.
WL: So, I have fun with it, but I just played soccer at Rutgers. By the end of the soccer season, I was so far behind in all my engineering studies that I had to spend the rest of the year catching up. [laughter]
SH: Was soccer played in the spring or the fall?
WL: Fall, yes. I guess it still is, I don’t know. I don’t know when the girls and little kids play it. …
SH: You mentioned earlier that men from the DKE House visited you before you came to Rutgers. Did any other fraternities visit you beforehand? Did you visit Rutgers?
WL: No. That was the only one I remember coming around looking for pledges beforehand.
SH: Your sisters had gone to NJC. Had anyone else that you knew, any of your friends, gone to Rutgers already?
WL: No. It was basically, I think, [due to the fact that] my father had hired some guys from Rutgers at Merck’s and he just said, "If you want to take engineering, they have a good engineering school. I can afford it," [laughter] and I said, "Okay."
SH: Where did you live when you first came to Rutgers?
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WL: Pell Hall, in the Quadrangle. … You’re going to talk to Charlie Prout this afternoon? Well, Charlie and I were thrown together as roommates. That’s where I met him, in the fall of our freshman year, and he was all gung ho, for some reason I’m not quite sure [of] anymore, for the Beta House, and so, he pledged Beta right away and everything and that kind of pulled several more of us in. So, I ended up being a Beta, as did several others, but … he moved into the Beta House in the middle of the year. So, I got a second roommate the second half of the year in Pell Hall. … Charlie and I go back to our freshman year together. [laughter]
SH: Who was your roommate after Charlie?
WL: A guy named Frank Whitby. … Charlie’s seen more of him than I have, lately. He was a Beta as well. …
SH: After your freshman year, did you move into the Beta House?
WL: Well, I was going to live there and they had a dormitory in one big room on the third (top) floors, then they had desks in all the rooms on the second floor. … I had about three or four months there and I said, "If I stay here, I’m going to flunk, because [laughter] I need a place to call my own when I study," … and a couple of others were having problems, too. So, we rented an apartment downtown, over a florist’s shop. … People didn’t rent apartments to young men in those days, or young women, either. You almost had to be married, but this gal that ran the florist’s shop kind of liked us, and so, she said, "Okay," and so, we had a great time in that florist’s shop. … The florist’s shop was closed evenings and weekends, so, she didn’t hear some of the things that went on up there, just as well. [laughter] … Then, I had a room in the top floor of Ford Hall in my junior year, and then, they had some rooms on the second floor, two-bedroom suites, two bedrooms and a living room, and a guy named Rollin Thorne and I rented [and] lived in one of those my senior year. … So, that was kind of nice. … I went by there when I was there in 2000 and they’ve got so many locks and things on the doors anymore; you know, back in the ‘30s, they were wide open. It was a nice building, nice place to live.
SH: It was fairly new back then.
WL: I think so, yes. I’m not quite [sure], yes.
SH: What about mandatory chapel?
WL: … Did we have to go to that? I think maybe we had to go to a certain number [of services], but not too many. I don’t recall.
SH: Do you remember any of the speakers?
WL: No.
SH: What other activities were you involved in? I know that your course load was intense.
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WL: [laughter] Don’t excuse it. I can’t think of anything else, really, between the Beta House and soccer.
SH: Do you remember any dances or music programs?
WL: Oh, yes. You went to the Junior Prom and the Soph Hop and all of those. … SH: What about the freshman initiation?
WL: … As a pledge, you mean? Oh, yes, you wore a beanie cap, you wore a little freshman cap, but, other than that, I don’t recall, really, anything and I avoided the crap that the fraternities [did], carrying little thunder mugs, you know, and wearing bibs and the stuff that they did to the freshmen. I didn’t pledge until either late, at the end of, my freshman year or the start of the sophomore year, and we got some of the paddling and some of the stuff, but none of the more obvious stuff. I managed to avoid that part of the initiation.
SH: The initiation of the freshmen was run by the sophomores.
WL: Yes, yes. …
SH: As you entered Rutgers in 1937, how aware were you of what was going on in Europe?
WL: Oh, you know, we were aware of it, but it seemed a long way off. … I did read President [Robert C.] Clothier’s address the other day. I forget where I saw it, but it was in some of the stuff my mother kept and I think I still have it, his commencement address to us when we graduated in ‘41, and he knew we were all going to war. We didn’t yet, but he knew it and it was quite a speech.
SH: It pointed towards what was coming. The draft had been instituted the year before.
WL: Well, I was going to tell that story, … because I was the age that I couldn’t avoid the war. … We registered for the draft, the first draft, on October 16, 1940, … anybody twenty-one or older. So, that was my twenty-first birthday. So, they had it all set up in the gym, "L-M-N," and "P-Q-R," you know, and so, I went to the "L" table and sat down with a guy and he goes along and he said, "When’s your birthday?" and I said, "October 16, 1919." "Well, were you born in the morning or the afternoon? Maybe you’re not twenty-one yet, you know," [laughter] and so, as I say, … I was the age. … The war was going to affect me one way or the other, and then, that was followed up by when I was working in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 7, 1941. … My first job was in a paper mill outside of Charleston, Westvaco Paper Mill, and there were four of us, that Sunday, playing golf on the Charleston Municipal Golf Course. We were all twenty-two and single and we came back and heard about Pearl Harbor. … We stayed there and got drunk and wondered where we’d be a year later and we were all gone to someplace, you know. I joined the Navy and I’ve lost track of the others, [where] they went, but twenty-two and single on December 7th, or being twenty-one on the day the draft is instituted, you know, [the war was unavoidable]. [laughter]
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SH: Had you taken ROTC at Rutgers?
WL: No. I stayed out of that. I was still a Quaker at that point, and so, they had some physical education class or something we had to take for, I guess, the freshman year.
SH: Did you suffer any grief from any of the other students?
WL: Oh, no, no, there was no stigma attached to it at all, you know, but, along the way, I decided I really didn’t feel strongly enough about it that I should stay out of the military. … It was rather obvious that something needed to be done about Hitler and a few other things, by the time the need arose. [laughter]
SH: Were you shocked that the Japanese attacked us, that it was Japan that pushed us into the war, rather than Germany?
WL: How did we feel, surprised? It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to Roosevelt, because … we jumped into the war to defend ourselves. I’m sure, at this point, that George W. Bush wishes … they’d done something, because starting a war is the toughest thing to justify a little while later, no matter how right it is, I happen to think. [Editor’s Note: Mr. Llewellyn is referring to the 2003 War in Iraq.]
SH: Was your family politically involved?
WL: No. … Quakers, over the years; … they weren’t activists. … Quakerism is, as I like to think of it, they weren’t activists, … they just said, "This is what we believe and this is the way we’re going to live and we’re going to live it, no matter what you say," you know, and so, they taught by example and by the way they lived. … Some of the Quakers today, … they’re more "convinced Friends," as we say, rather than "birthright," and they tend to be activist types who say, "Oh, boy, … I can get in there and I can talk about these things with people," and so, they’re much more activist and not exactly the way Quakers used to do things, okay? [laughter]
SH: How did your family feel about Roosevelt and the New Deal?
WL: Oh, my father hated his guts, [laughter] because Herbert Hoover was a Quaker, as you know, and the New Deal and all the rest were [not good]. You either hated Roosevelt or you loved him, and my father hated him. [laughter]
SH: Before you left the campus in 1941, would you have said that the majority of the students at Rutgers were Democrats, Republicans or did not care?
WL: I think didn’t care. I wasn’t aware of any real activism on campus very much. SH: Did anyone talk about being isolationist or supporting the America First movement?
WL: We weren’t talking about it, no. … There was really no politics on the campus, that I was aware of. …
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SH: Did you have any friends at NJC?
WL: No. We tended to avoid NJC like the plague, you know. You wanted a girl from any place else. [laughter] So, you only went there in desperation. [laughter] So, Dave Heacock, a fraternity brother and also from the Pell Hall group that went to the Beta House, who took engineering, he [dated] … Kat [Kathryn] Griggs, her name was, at NJC and they went together for, I guess, at least three years, all the time, and married [laughter] and Kat’s father had, … I think, the Ford franchise for Northern New Jersey or something. So, they prospered under that arrangement. So, he was a good engineer, too, for RCA.
SH: Were you dating anyone while you were at Rutgers?
WL: Not regularly at all. I brought Anne [down], a gal named Anne Satterthwaite, a girl I knew in Plainfield, and she was a lot of fun, when I’d bring her in for the weekends and things, and then, I had another one, (Bobbie Joseph?). [laughter]
SH: As you entered the job market in 1941, you had already signed up for the draft. Was it difficult to find a job, knowing what was coming? Was the economy already gearing up for war, with lend-lease, and so forth? Were there more opportunities for mechanical engineers?
WL: They were able to get deferments, … because of your employment, for engineers, in those days and Westvaco had me deferred until, after Pearl Harbor, I decided [to leave]. I applied for a commission … as an engineering officer in the Navy. So, they immediately dropped any deferment for me and I went 1-A and I had rolled a Model A Roadster over in my sophomore year at college and knocked out my four front upper teeth.
SH: After you had them straightened.
WL: Yes, my parents weren’t too happy about it. [laughter] and I had a partial. … You had to get a medical dispensation, I guess, to be an officer with any replaced teeth in those days, because officers are supposed to be able to talk no matter what happens, but … I did get it. So, I got the commission, but it kind of delayed the process. … I was 1-A and I was looking over my shoulder on this a little bit. So, I went and applied to the Air Corps as a flight engineer and I figured, "If I don’t get the Navy commission, I’ll get a commission in the Air Corps and I’ll take the first one that comes," and the Navy commission came on, I don’t know, I think, I guess, a day in the summer, in June of ’42, and so, I went and got sworn in, but … the Air Corps commission came in a week later. … I always wondered what my life would have been [like] if it had been the other way around, because I’d have been in the Air Corps, rather than the Navy, but that was the only time I began to worry about the draft. …
SH: After graduation, you immediately went to Westvaco in Charleston.
WL: Yes, I had the job down there in Charleston. … The reason I took the job was, it was the farthest one from New York that I got an offer [for]. [laughter] I wanted to get out. I figured, "There’s got to be someplace better to live than North Jersey." [laughter]
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SH: Before we get into your Navy career, had your family ever gone on vacations? You were familiar with Philadelphia and New York. Had you done much traveling outside of New Jersey as a young man?
WL: Not too much. … When I had my summer jobs, … I had a Model A Roadster. That’s a lovely car at that age. [laughter]
SH: You were very fortunate. Were you very popular?
WL: [laughter] Well, there were certain girls that I dated and they’d ask, if it was the winter, they’d say, "What car have you got?" and if I said, "The Model A Roadster," they’d say, "No thanks." If I said, "I’ve got my father’s car for the weekend," why, they’d say, "Okay," and they used to have valet parking at some of these nightclubs we’d go to around Jersey, and I can remember going up in this thing. …
To be continued on the next blog post….
Bill in his Ford Model A Roadster about 1938
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