Page 132 - Anthology

I was born in 1932 in Georgetown, Kentucky. I am the youngest of seven children. I lived on the wild
side of town and I led a rough life until I met my wife. That’s when I began going to church and became a
Christian. I’m 82 and back in those days we drank and did whatever we did to just get by.

I worked everywhere. I started with the Georgetown water company. We’d dig ditches by hand. I did
anything to put food on the table. When I got out of the Air Force, I painted houses and worked at the
drug store. Again, whatever I could do to make money. I had a poor education. I only have a sixth-grade
education. My father died when I was young, and I had to take over.

I was living in Georgetown when I volunteered and joined the Air Force. I went to basic at Sheppard, Air
Force Base. I was trained as a fire fighter. I was on the fire department in Georgetown, so the Air Force
trained me to be a fire fighter with them. They had a big pit that would be filled with JP4 fuel and they’d
put a dummy in the middle. We had to go into the fire and rescue the dummy.

After basic, I was sent to Lake Charles, Louisiana; from there we went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. There
was a tent big enough for a B29 bomber. There were ten of them - ten tents and ten planes. I touched
an atom bomb on one of those planes. I think there was only the one bomb. It was a way to disguise
where it was.

Enola Gay, a Silverlate version of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress
landing after delivering Little Boy over Hiroshima

One of the B-29's final roles during World War II was carrying out the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.