Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 36
Q: What was your food like?
A: Good food, we had good food.
Q: When you stopped at France, did you have time to see any of the
country?
A: Well, yes, we would go to shore at night and take a chocolate bar or
a cake of soap and trade that for food and anything else in France because
they didn't have any soap or chocolate candy or nothing like that. If
you wanted a date with a gal all you had to do was to have a chocolate
bar. I was sent out with the receiving ship, what they called a receiving
ship, nothing but a camp. So I got a job, a fellow named McPherson and I
was in the Boston navy yard. They sent us what they called subsistance,
where they gave us $2.50 a day to live on the outside, and I got a job
working at a restaurant just outside of the navy yard. This fellow that
owned that, he and Vic McPherson, they were Commissary Stewarts in the
navy and they wanted me to stay there and go to work at the bar for the
restaurant. They owned five restaurants, so I stayed there until I got
homesick.
Q: How long were you there?
A: I stayed there about three months, and I told them I had to get home
and settle in the States.
Q: Did you make lots of friends in the navy?
A: Oh, yes, but I've forgotten all of them now. They all scattered.
Q: Did you keep in contact with any of them afterwards?
A: Some of them every once in a while. They soon died out. They had
their home lives the same as I did. But anyway I went back to this when
I got out of the navy, I left McPherson and them. I quit and I come back
home here and I went to Divernon. I worked a while and then I quit the
mine and then I went to get a job at Mr. Latham's selling cars. I told
you about before.
Q: Can I ask you a few more things about the coal mine? I've never been
in one and it is hard for me to imagine how back in those days they had
equipment to dig that deep, what did they use and how did they go about
that?
A: Well, they didn't dig, they would drill a hold, they'd drill in there
and then they'd shoot a little shot here. Then they would put a deeper
shot in here, a hold about that big around and fill that full of powder
and then would tamp that with clay and wet paper or whatever and there
would be a shotfire come around at night. All the men in the daythe
would be quitting and going home and there would be nobody in the mine
but a couple of shotfires. They would come around in the afternoon and
count your shots and they would go around and light these shots on the
run. They would light the shots and keep on running and that would all
be blown out and that would blow that coal out.