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Interviewed by: Mike Michalski |
| During World War II it was very
difficult to do anything without being reminded that we were in an all-out war. The
American people were very conscious that we were in a constant battle for our survival. We
could easily have lost that war. We were so ill-prepared. Fortunately, once the bombing of
Pearl Harbor had taken place the attitude of the people changed. It was now "Remember
Pearl Harbor, Let’s get the job done." If anybody felt that it was wrong to be
in World War II, they had the good graces to keep their mouth shut. Most people felt that
it was a war we had to win and you didn’t hear anybody objecting. Everything was
rationed. No matter how much money you had, without a ration coupon you couldn’t buy
shoes or tires for your automobile. You could only buy a certain amount of gasoline,
depending on whether you had an essential job or not.
I volunteered and signed up for the Air Force Enlisted Reserve in 1942. I was 21. The war had been going on in Europe for a while, but after Pearl Harbor, when America entered, we were completely unprepared. We suddenly found ourselves in a war in the South Pacific with the Japanese and in a war in Europe with the Germans and the Italians. We had a tremendous job to do. We had to build air bases and all kinds of facilities to train people. We had to get a lot of people trained and get them overseas. We had to get airplanes built. It couldn’t all be done overnight. So when I enlisted, they asked those of us in college to stay there until they had a chance to set up flying schools and were prepared for us. I knew I was going in to fly. They had those of us they knew were capable of becoming pilots take all the necessary examinations. Six months, later they called me up and I went through the training. It was February 1943. Any training is somewhat hard. You have to apply yourself and learn how to do the things you need to do. It’s not going to a picnic. I completed my training, was rated a pilot and commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant the following February, just one year later.
Our crew received our overseas orders in August 1944. We left Topeka and were told to go to an airfield in New Hampshire. There they gave us sealed orders in a manila envelope. We were told to head towards Gander Lake, Newfoundland. One hour outside of the US we were allowed to open the orders. We thought we were going to England. An hour out of Maine we opened them and were told to go to The 15th Air Force in Italy. We flew by way of the Azores, Marrakech, Tunis and then went on to southern Italy. We reported to the 15th Air Force and were assigned to the 460th Bomb group and the 760th Bomb Squadron. Our camp was fairly basic. We lived in tents. I wasn’t there when they built the base but they told me that everything was loaded onto a train. When it got there, it stopped, and they pointed to this wheat field. "Boys, " they said. There’s your base. Get busy and build it." We were living among our former enemies. We didn’t fraternize with them. In fact the nearest little town was off limits. The Italians still weren’t very friendly towards us and we didn’t trust them. There were about 40 planes at our airfield, but ours was just one of many bases. On major efforts there might be 1000 planes flying.
The Deputy Commander took over. He’d only been on two or three
missions. He saw what was happening and he put the squadron through a lot of training. He
would ride the tail gun of the lead aircraft on practice missions so he could see where
every one of the pilots was flying. He was pretty strict and he saw that we weren’t
flying in a tight enough formation. Somehow though the message to fly tighter hadn’t
filtered down to me. We were flying like we had in the States. Spread out a little more.
Every day that we didn’t fly a mission it seemed like we were being called to go for
a practice formation. One day they told us to get ready for a practice formation at 10:30.
"Be sure to be on time," they said. "Major Mason, Operations Officer is
going to personally lead the formation." I had a lot of other things that I was
wanting to get on with but I didn’t have much choice. I was getting a bit disgusted.
I figured that if we hadn’t learned how to fly formation by then, we were not going
to learn. I said to my other pilot, "Let’s just fly Well, we didn’t hear anything for a couple of days. Then I asked Darden if he’d heard anything about us flying so close. He said he’d seen Major Mason in the bar who’d asked if we liked to fly in the No. 3 position. Darden said that we didn’t have any objection. Major Mason had replied, "Good. You’re the only pilots we’ve got that can fly that position and fly it right, so if it’s all right with you, we’ll just keep you right there." That’s how I learned how tight you were supposed to fly. It was right about then that we started to build a house to live in. We were living in tents. Winter was coming on and they advised us to get some better quarters. Those tents would fall down at night when it rained. The tent stakes would pull out and the ground was such that you couldn’t keep them in. So we hired an Italian contractor. He lived in the little town we weren’t allowed to go to but he was doing work on the base. Some Italians wouldn’t sell to Americans so he would buy materials for us and we paid him. He had three other Italians who helped him and he built the house with materials that we acquired. We called the house Casa Manana. It had a red tile roof and a red tile floor. It was 18 feet by 24 feet and had a fireplace in it. It cost us $176 to build. We lived in it for less than two weeks, and then we were shot down. The Executive Officer sold it for $200 to a new crew that came in. He sent $50 to each of our next of kin. When I got home my Dad had got a check from the government for $85. I knew what that was. I had $35 in my billfold in that house when I was shot down. The other $50 was my part of the proceeds of the sale of the house. I did not have a picture of it after it was completed. A year ago, at a reunion of my old bombardment group, I met another pilot and co-pilot that had come to the 760th bomb squadron after I’d got shot down. I asked them where they had lived on the base and they described a house. When they mentioned a bubble in one of the windows I knew it was the house that I’d helped build. I’d taken that window out of a wrecked B-24. Turned out that they’d bought our house. That pilot had a photograph of Casa Manana taken just before Christmas and he gave to me. Our job in the 760th Bomb squad was strategic bombing. Everyone that’s in the service, if they’re not an infantryman carrying a rifle up on the front lines, then they’ve a job that somehow or other supports the infantrymen. They’re trying to get supplies produced and delivered to the soldiers, or providing artillery to back them up. Or they were trying to prevent the enemy, the Germans, from doing that for their front line soldiers. So we flew bombing missions. Our job was to bomb factories, the oil refineries and the oil storage depots. We were also to destroy the transportation system and various things the Germans were using to get supplies up to fight against our boys. I was shot down on the 18th November 1944 on my 21st mission. We kinda knew, when you do that kind of work, the chances are fairly high that you’re going to get shot down. You hope you get out of the airplane, survive and aren’t injured. But if you do, your chances then of being captured are quite high. This depends on where you go down. If you went down in Germany you were going to get captured. Your chances of evading capture were poor. If you went down in Yugoslavia, territory that the Germans occupied but didn’t control, there were partisan troops; Chetniks and other groups of people who were guerrilla fighters in the mountains fighting against the Germans. If the partisans caught you, they might help you and deliver you back to your American people. This would take several months. The Chetniks might help you, or they might turn you over to the Germans. Then there were the Ustashi who were sort of on the German side. If they caught you, they would most probably kill you. So it was a gamble as to where you got shot down, whether you got out of the airplane or not and who captured you. You knew that if you continued to fly those missions, eventually you would get shot down. I got shot down on a mission to Udine. We’d been going over Vienna, Austria. That was the second-most heavily defended target in Europe after Berlin. (It was so tough that we got credit for two missions every time we flew it.) We’d been flying up there more than we wanted to. At the briefing the morning of the 18th we found out that we were going to bomb some airfields at Udine. That wasn’t supposed to be as heavily defended. We were happy. We thought that we had a ‘milk run’ (a real easy mission). But it didn’t turn out that way. One shell to hit you right is all it takes. Four of us out of the crew of 10 got captured. (The other six evaded capture and managed to get back. It took them from 3 to 5 months.) We were shot down around Pola, Italy. It was heavily infested with Germans, but there were also a lot of partisan troops there. The navigator got caught within a few minutes. Us two pilots got together and spent the night together. Intelligence had told us in our briefing to make a delayed parachute jump. We were to wait until we were low to the ground before we opened our ‘chutes. If you open it too high in the air, the enemy can see you coming down, they’ll get in their vehicles and be there waiting for you when you hit the ground! As soon as you hit the ground, you were to hide your parachute and try to hide out until the end of the second day after you'd landed. If you could keep from being captured until then, the German search parties would generally give up. Then you could get out and try to travel and try to make contact with someone who was friendly. Us two pilots were so close to where the airplane crashed that we didn’t have a chance to find a hiding place. There were a large bunch of German soldiers in the area. They surrounded the whole area. We hid out ‘til about noon the next day. Then the Germans came through, lined up, a string of them, searching, and they caught us. We were hiding in some brush. They immediately rushed us into town because they already had the navigator set up to go to Dulag Luft, which was the interrogation center near Frankfurt. They had three German soldiers going home on leave to escort him up to Frankfurt. They wanted to put us in the same party. So they rushed us in and the three of us left. The Engineer broke his ankle when he bailed out. The partisan troops who found him did not have any medical facilities. They couldn’t treat him. The bombardier told me later that they thought gangrene had already set in his leg. The partisan troops said that the best thing we could do was allow him to be captured by the Germans. They put him in a little underground outpost, pulled back and allowed the Germans to come in and capture him. They gave him some medical attention, saved his leg and he survived. He eventually got home. We were captured about noon and by 6 o’clock we were on a train heading towards Germany. On the train we were in with all the civilians. There were three soldiers guarding us. We picked up four other American Airmen. So there were seven of us by the time we got to Frankfurt. It was somewhat gratifying really. We’d been doing these bombing missions, bombing out all the railroad marshaling yards (switchyards) to keep them from using their transportation system. We got up to Trieste, which was the first railroad switchyard after we left Pola, and the train stopped before we got all the way to town. We had to get off and walk through town. Then catch a train on the other side. The reason was our own outfit had bombed the marshaling yards! The Germans didn’t have it in operation! It made us feel pretty good. Our work was being effective in other words. We found that to be the case a number of times on the way to Germany. Sometimes when we had to get out and walk the Germans would see some vehicle and they would commandeer it and force the driver to load us up and drive us through town. That made us feel pretty good too. We never saw any gasoline-operated vehicles. We were trying to destroy the oil refineries and the oil storage facilities to keep the Germans from using them, because we wanted to help our boys out. And none of the civilians had any gasoline. They weren’t allowed to have anything. Trucks were charcoal burners. They had a little outfit sitting out on the running board. It had charcoal briquettes burning which somehow or other produced gas to run that vehicle. Every vehicle I saw moving, that any civilian had, was a charcoal burner. So we knew that our boys who had been bombing the oil refineries were doing some good. We got to Dulag Luft in a suburb of Frankfurt. There they put us in solitary confinement. They separated us so we could no longer get together. The cell was a little room about 6 feet wide and about 8 or 9 feet long. There was what they called a bed. It was more of a torture rack. It had 4 slats and draped over it was what you might think of as a mattress. A really open, woven sort of a sack filled with excelsior. That was packing material. Shredded wood for when they shipped dishes. The mattress was filled with shredded wood. If you tried to lie on it, it was very, very uncomfortable. I put it on the floor but I’d hardly laid down on it when the door opened and the guard was pointing his rifle at me and saying, "Forbidden, forbidden." He made me put it back on the slats. I figured he wouldn’t be on duty for 24 hours. So I waited until it was dark. Then I put it back on the floor and at night I slept on it there. But I knew I’d better get it put back up in the daytime. The room was heated but they controlled the thermostat and it was often deliberately too hot in there. They were trying to break us down so we would give them information. Our instructions were to give them our name, rank and serial number and that’s all. I think I succeeded in that. The man who interrogated me thought I was pretty stubborn because I wouldn’t tell him anything. I stood up to him. I told him that our instructions were to give him only name, rank and serial number.
You knew that they knew a lot of things. For example, another time I’d been interrogated and had been back in my cell for only a few minutes when they called me again. I thought, "What are they going to do with me now?" They took me back in the same room. The first time I’d gone in I’d seen a brand new Loran navigation set over in the corner. A week before we’d got shot down we’d got the first Loran navigation set in our squadron. We’d tested our gear. I’d asked the navigator if he knew how to work it. He didn’t know much more than if you turned a switch and counted the blips it told you how far you were from the radio station and from that you could work out where you were. Then he’d gone for 5 days training on how to use the set. He got back about 11 o’clock at night and saw that we were scheduled for a mission the next day. He told us to take the substitute navigator’s name off and said that he was going to fly with us. The next day we got shot down. So there was a Loran navigation set in the interrogation room that the Germans had gotten hold of. The first thing the interrogator said to me when I got in the second time was was, "Lieutenant Lamar, we’ve received word that there was a Lieutenant Lamar was shot down over Northern Italy last spring and evaded capture. We think you’re that guy." It was understood, through the rules of warfare, that if you got shot down and you evaded capture, they didn’t want you to fly in that territory again. They’d send you to the south Pacific or some place else. Because technically you could be classified as a spy rather than a military person. That’s what he was trying to get me with. I said, "Sir, I’m well aware there was another soldier by
the name of Lamar ahead of me in training. Possibly he’s flying out of Italy. I
don’t know. That’s not me." He replied, "Lieutenant Lamar. You are about the most stubborn individual I’ve ever encountered. You don’t need to tell me all this. I know everything you’ll tell me. I’m just trying to properly classify you as a POW rather than as a spy. I know all this." He turned around and picked up a book. He opened it in the middle. I could see on the front of it ‘460th Bombardment Group – The Black Panthers’ (That was our emblem.) He said, "I know that your commanding officer was Colonel John Price…." He went down through all the group officers. Then he went down through the entire squadron until he got to a First Lieutenant. Now, two days before we got shot down, this Lieutenant had been promoted to Captain and moved over to a position at Group Headquarters. When the German got to his name, he slowed up, he looked over the top of that book at me and he read it like it was recorded. I kept the best poker face that I possibly could. I shrugged as if to imply "if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is". Like I didn’t even know. He knew that something had happened to that fellow. And that had happened barely two weeks before the event. I think he probably knew what the promotion was and all about it. But he was giving me an opening to think, "Well, I bet he knows all the rest of this anyway. Why not give it to him? Then he’ll classify me as a POW and send me on out. I won’t have to endure this." He may have not known what happened but he knew that something had happened. I kept my best poker face and looked at him. He finally let me go and that was the last I saw of him. But it shows how much they knew. He knew in that short a time about that First Lieutenant being promoted to a Captain. He was using that as an opportunity to try and get me started talking. American intelligence had told us that if you stay around there too long you know you’re giving them some information that’s helpful to them. I didn’t want to stay around there. It wasn’t a very comfortable place to stay. I would love to have gotten my hands on that book though. I think it was all blank pages. Except maybe the list of officers. If American Intelligence had written a book about the 460th Bombardment Group I don’t think it would have taken up a book more than ¼ inch thick. Maybe if it was a book about all Bombardment Groups it would have been thicker. I think it was made to deliberately fool you. He had it open at the middle and in this country if you wrote a book about a Bombardment Group, the list of officers would be at the front or the back! The food in solitary confinement was meager. For breakfast we had bread with a smear of margarine. Lunch was soup, either made with alfalfa seeds or cracked wheat. (The former tasted better than the latter). And for dinner we had another piece of bread, this time with a smear of jelly. After we had been interrogated, we were transferred to Stalag Luft, a POW camp up near Barth on the Baltic Sea due north of Berlin. We went by train. We were bombed one night when we at a railroad station. It was after dark. The air raid sirens went off. We knew the RAF (British Air Force) was overhead. They bombed at night. They didn’t bomb in formation. They came along and the lead aircraft dropped red flares. Then when they got to the target the lead aircraft would drop a green flare and light up the target. The planes following would follow the red flares. There were eight of us in the compartment and not much room. I was lying on the floor. There was an RAF Spitfire pilot up in the baggage rack where smaller guys could lie. When the air raid sirens went off, we watched the German Civilians make a wild rush for the air raid shelters. Red flares started coming down. The train started moving. Finally somebody in the hallway stuck their head in our compartment and said, "What’s a green flare mean? One just bounced off the car up behind the engine." That RAF pilot flew out of the luggage compartment and said, "Hit the deck, that’s the center of the target." Then the bombs started. They hit on both sides of the track. Then came the anti aircraft fire. There’s nothing noisier. Between that and the pieces of shrapnel hitting and the bombs going off, it was the most frightening, noisiest situation that I have ever encountered. I wouldn’t wish anyone to be involved in anything like that. The trained slowed several times but kept going and we all got out of it. My pilot was on the top and he could see out over the top of the glass. He said that he could see steel beams, tanks, and railroad cars going up into the air. The RAF must have got what they were going for. The next day, December 7th, we pulled into Berlin. After the war I wrote to the RAF to ask what targets they bombed on the night of December 6th. They were bombing a synthetic oil plant at Mersburg near a town named Leuna.
I arrived at Stalag Luft on December 8th. The camp was out on a sort of peninsula at Barth. We had over 7000 in that one camp. I met some people that I knew. There was a Major in the same barracks that I was in who had been a flying instructor in St. Joseph before the war. He came over from one of the other compounds to help get set up. There were four compounds in that camp. We opened up the fourth compound that had just been built. For a while there were only the people who had been on our train. As time went on more people came in. We found other people we knew. One of the crews we’d trained with in the States had been assigned to the same bomb squadron and got shot down a week after we did. On rare occasions we got over into the other compounds and got to see some people we knew. The camp was for allied airmen. The majority of the men in the camp were American. There were a few British, a few French, one fellow from South Africa, an Australian or two and a scattering of other Allies. If we had been given adequate food then we probably couldn’t have complained too much. We were living on 800 calories a day and we got pretty skinny. There was a system set up through the International Red Cross to get prisoners of war food parcels. In theory you were supposed to get one of those a week. They were things that would supplement our diet. Mostly what the Germans gave you were potatoes, cabbage and rutabagas. If the food parcels got there, they had a little can of powdered milk, a can with jelly in it, a couple of packs of cigarettes. Some of them had a chocolate bar in them. A few of them had mixture of a salt and pepper, which the Germans took away. They were afraid you’d use it to destroy the scent of the dogs tracking you if you escaped. The Red Cross Food parcels came from different countries. They were sent by Argentina, Canada, Britain. They were all different, yet the same size and had different things in them. I got two in December and I didn’t get any more until March 27th. The boys were getting in pretty bad shape by then. At roll call when they counted people to see of anyone had escaped during the night, people were just passing out. The story, which I knew then and have heard repeated a number of times since, was that parcels were being delivered to the seaport at Rostock on the Baltic Sea. But the Germans wouldn’t deliver them. They didn’t have the gasoline for it. Of course that was one of the things we were trying to do. Destroy their gasoline production. Through the International Red Cross, the Americans gave the Germans gasoline to be used for that purpose. They actually got some POWs to drive the German military trucks up there, bringing the food parcels, and to distribute them to the various POW camps. So on March 27th I got one. I remember that day very, very well. It was my birthday. We were allowed to write two letters a month. One of mine got through to my folks, one got through to my cousin. We found out after the war was over that they never censored them. There was a room full of mail that we’d written that they never did forward because they didn’t have enough people to censor it. I did think about escaping. But I never carried it out. It would have been foolish. We were not in very good physical condition. We didn’t have food to take with us. There was no outside to help. We didn’t speak the language. Your chances were so low. We couldn’t tunnel, because of the sandy soil and high water table. We were not much above sea level. So there wasn’t much in the way of escape attempts. Although I’ve read since that there was some tunneling going on. I did see two POWs underneath one of the barracks once when I was once watching a softball game. They were installing a radio wire but anything like that was kept highly secret for obvious reasons. We had a small radio on which we listened to the BBC. Towards the end of the war the guards were being bribed because we were worried that they would find the radio. News from the BBC was taken down every evening in shorthand and typed up on a single sheet of onion-skin paper using an old typewriter. A copy was made for each compound. It was folded so small that it could be put inside a watch which had had the workings taken out. The hands on the watch were set to the correct time in case the Germans looked, and that way the secret newspaper was carried to each compound. It arrived at 5:00 PM and had to be read to every POW before lock-up time. Each barrack had a newsman who would read it. Everyone dropped everything to listen. Then it would go to the next barrack and finally be destroyed that night. I stayed there in that camp until the war was over. The Russian soldiers came through, arrived at our camp in May 1st 1945. That was about 9 days before the war was over, I think. We were with the Russians for about two weeks, until the 8th Air Force came in with B-17 bombers. We all ran and jumped aboard the bombers and flew out of there, heading home. From the time I was shot down until the time I was in Allied hands again it was about 6 months. Some of those boys had been in there for several years. I came home to Virginia by boat, arriving in late June. When I got back to my home on a small farm north of Kansas City, my mother went outside and killed a chicken. I had fried chicken and fresh milk for my first meal back in Kansas. Permission granted for use by: Lee Lamar ©
2001 |
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Copyright © 2001 Nieman Enhanced Learning Center
Lee Lamar
Every time you went down the
street, almost every house had a rectangle of silk displayed in their window, with a star
on it for every member of the family in the armed services. There might be from one to
five stars.
Then I was assigned as an instructor, sent to basic flying
school and had the chance to join the crew of a B-24 bomber as co-pilot. The B-24 was a
four-engine, twin-tailed plane. Henry Ford was turning those out at the rate of one every
55 minutes at the height of production. There was quite a contrast between the situation
of the boys who went to England and those of us who went to Italy. The 8th Air
Force in Britain flew B-17s. They got more publicity through the media people warping
things a little (not intentionally of course). A lot of the newspaper reporters preferred
to cover the war from England (where they could go into the pubs at night), so the B-17
was given a much higher profile. A lot more was heard about the B-17 than the B-24, even
though there were more B-24s built, they flew further, faster and carried more bombs. 
The B-24 had a crew of 10. The pilot, co-pilot, bombardier and navigator were
generally all officers. The other 6 were usually enlisted men. The other members of the
crew are the engineer (also the top-turret gunner), the assistant engineer gunner, the
nose-gunner, the ball-turret operator, the radio operator (who also fires one of the waist
guns) and the tail-gunner.
Our
commanding Officer was very strict about us flying in "tight" formation. When
you fly tight formation the enemy fighter planes coming in can be fired on by all the
other aircraft. If you fly "loose", the fighter planes can come in and pick you
off. They can even fly right through the formation. The tip of one plane wing was maybe 10
foot out from the adjacent plane. Occasionally they did hit each other. But if you worked
at it and learned how to do it, it was probably easier to fly tight formation than it was
to fly loose formation. You couldn’t look around though. You had to concentrate. I
learned just how close they wanted us to fly when I got there. Our Commanding Officer had
gotten shot down before we’d got there. A German fighter had come in and shot him
down on one of the first missions. 
so close to that guy today that he’ll be
afraid to ever fly in the same formation with us again." Darden (the other pilot).
was a big ol’ Texan who’d lived a kinda wild life, and it was pretty easy to
talk him into something. So he agreed. We were No. 3 position. We took off and for 4 solid
hours we held it real close to the lead aircraft. You could see the expression on
Major Mason’s face when he turned around to look at us. He never smiled. After a
while I noticed that he would look around at me and give me a signal with his finger to
show which way he was going to turn. I’d nod my head and stay right with him. After
little a while he’d look around and give another signal. I’d nod my head. That
surprised me because instructors give instructions that way when you’re first
learning to fly formation, but after you’ve learned you’re supposed to watch the
movement of his plane and respond. When we landed I said to Darden, "We may have
overdone it. We may get called on the carpet." 
My cell number was 88. When I heard "acht und achsty" yelled down
the hallway I knew that the guard was going to come and take me out into another building
and interrogate me. Those were the first numbers I learned in German, "acht und
achsty". I was interrogated maybe 8 or 9 times. Each interrogation lasted about half
an hour to an hour. Everything would be done to intimidate you. If I told you I
wasn’t frightened, I’d be lying. Everybody who goes through that kind of
experience is apprehensive. I was very, very fortunate in being captured by the German
Wehrmacht, which was the ground army in the interior of Germany. If you were captured by
civilians, you might be killed. Many civilians were fanatical and believed Himmler, the
propaganda minister of Germany, when he said we Americans were warmongers and
terror-figures. We ought to be killed. A lot of civilians believed that and killed our
American airmen. If you were captured by the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, they would
not harm you. If you were captured by the Wehrmacht on the front line, where American
fighter planes had been strafing, they might shoot you, because they weren’t happy
about being strafed. If you were captured by the Wehrmacht back in the interior, where
they had not seen front line service, they would probably turn you over to the Luftwaffe.
That’s what happened to me. Once I was in the hands of the Luftwaffe, I felt
reasonably comfortable that they would not deliberately harm me. But we weren’t too
sure about that. Because some of the S.S. were always around, and they were fanatics who
might harm you. Everybody who was caught was concerned, but those who were most concerned
were those Americans who were of Jewish faith. We knew what the Germans were doing to the
Jewish people. Some of those boys changed their nametags, some even altered their names so
they wouldn’t sound Jewish.
One of the Officers who interrogated me tried to be nice
to me. He was dressed in civilian clothes (but I’m sure he was a German Officer). He
tried to impress me by talking about all the progress in Germany. He claimed to have lived
in Canada. Claimed to have raised wheat 200 miles further north in Canada than anyone else
had at that time. He tried to get me to talk but I acted like I was extremely interested
in everything he'd said. I would listen to him and then he’d try to get me to talk
again. I said that I was fascinated with his life. I said that I hadn’t had anything
like that to talk about. He finally gave up on me.
