CWU Living History Project

Prater Hogue

Smith: Our subject today is Prater Hogue, an alumnus of Central. Prater, let’s start with you giving us a short autobiography.

Hogue: Well, I was born here in Kittitas Valley. My grandparents were early pioneers here. My father was a teacher in a rural school at the time I was born and I grew up in Ellensburg. Went through Edison School over here and then Morgan Junior High and through the Ellensburg High School. I graduated from high school in 1935 and enrolled in Central in the fall of ‘35. I think the latter part of ‘70 - or the latter part of ‘35. I had some - I had some apprehension about going to Central because my father was on the faculty up here and I was at that age when you didn’t like to - to not have somebody watching you all of the time but you thought they were watching you but I don’t think they were. I wish they would have. (laughs) So I started the fall of ‘35 here. As I remember, history may reveal it, there were 100 boys and 300 girls at the school at the time. About 400. Munson Hall was not quite full of boys. There was a number of them in there but they didn’t fill the whole hall. The rest of them lived off campus. Quite a few of them from the valley here. My first introduction to college life was the first day I came into register. I think the registration desk was down on the first floor and I came up the stairs and I ran into a little man who was coming down the stairs. He didn’t see me and he bumped into me and I bumped into him and he turned and gave me a five minute lecture on courtesy to the professors of Central Washington University or Ellensburg Normal. When he got through, I thought I had been thoroughly chastised, he stuck out his hand and said, ‘Welcome to Ellensburg Normal. My name is Hinch.’

Smith: Excellent. Excellent.

Hogue: I liked him ever since.

Smith: He was a great guy.

Hogue: The classes were small. I look around the campus today and I see buildings and I wonder how many people here, now, can remember the people who were named - who those buildings were named after. I didn’t know Barge but I did know McConnell and a number of the others that are around here. Whitney, Beck, and Hogue, Randall, Michaelsen, the coach, Nicholson. The life at the school was different than it is now, I think. We were more - more of a group. We had Wednesday night social hours and dances down here in the gym at the bottom this building [Barge Hall]. We had - some nights we had an orchestra. Some nights we just had the piano. But it seemed like everybody turned out. Everybody was there. When we had a football game or a basketball game we had 200 girls and 100 boys there. They all turned out. And another thing that impressed me in those times was the number of faculty that turned out and went to the games. Dr. Sparks was always a time keeper and Dr. McConnell was always first or second row at the football games and basketball games. McCrae, Samuelson, Gresham were all there. I wonder if today if there’s the same interest. The classes, I think, though they were small, they were harder than they are now. Because I have some students who’ve lived at my place and I looked at the way they study and the way they prepare their homework and at least I had the concept that I had a real task on hand when I was doing it and they seem to take it like I don’t care if I get it done or not attitude. At least the ones that I’ve seen. It seemed like we had to work harder. Dr. Lind, who taught Chemistry, was a real taskmaster. He believed in a one hour class and a four hour study period at home, I think, and he really - he really taught us something. He really worked us. In my classes here, I had Mr. Hinch. I had Hal Holmes and his wife. I had Professor Stevens. I had Seldon Smyser and Shaw, McCrae, Shrader, and, let’s see, I had an art teacher by the name of Johnson - can’t think of her first name right now. I just about had one class from all of the faculty here in the three years I was here. My electives I had - I bounced around a little bit. My main interest was - I was interested in engineering. There were people who tried to discourage me from that because engineering didn’t have a real good hiring prospect in ‘36 and ‘37. There were engineers being graduated but there were more than the market could sort. So it looked to me like I had to get into some technical field in aviation and I was discouraged by several of my relatives including my dad who wanted me to be a teacher. Since I had had three years of pretty general course here he thought that if I could settle down another year and take some education courses I’d be given a position. I didn’t want to teach. I don’t know why. It always looked like a very fun job but I wasn’t interested in it. I was interested in more mechanical things. A note on that is - my dad was very disappointed that I didn’t want to teach and after going to work for Boeing and working there for about six weeks - a little over six weeks - the foreman came down one afternoon and asked me if I would be interested in teaching blueprint reading and I did. Taught there for a year. I didn’t want to teach but I ended up teaching anyway. It was a part time job. It was from 10:00 in the morning until 1:00 in the afternoon and then I worked at Boeing four to eleven thirty at night but I enjoyed it very much and when I got through with that they wanted me to teach some other classes. At that time, I had become a supervisor and I had to much work to do so I couldn’t do both jobs. But, my wife graduated from - Vivian Peter graduated from here in 1939 and she too was not - she was interested in teaching but an interesting aspect in those days - every place she applied they asked her if she intended to get married in the next couple of years and she said she didn’t know and they wouldn’t hire her. They wouldn’t hire a married lady. In fact, a couple students that we knew real welt were turned down on the basis that they had engagement rings on. Superintendent of the Board turned them down. It was a different era. Jobs were hard to get. They were watching pretty closely. We had - think the thing that left an everlasting memory in my mind about Washington State Normal School in Ellensburg was the friendliness of the students and the fun we had here. We had - I really enjoyed it. I think that in lots of ways that there were students including myself who became more mature during their several years here because of the - the very friendly attitude. People were in a depression and just about everybody who came here came from farms and from places where there was not an excessive income. They were all in the same boat and we all brought a dollar and a quarter ? for the formal dances and we went down to the NY and ate for a dollar and a half. It was not a day of spending lots of money. I don’t remember exactly what my tuition was but it seems that in 1935 the total fees I paid at the Registration office was about $90 for the quarter and I hear some of the fees that they’re paying today and I think gee, what a difference. We had a very active student body. We had - the student body had a Director of Social Events and he was derelict in his job if he didn’t have something planned every weekend and on Wednesdays too. We had - sometimes we had dances on Wednesdays downstairs here and other nights we go to Kamola Hall - or Sue Lombard Hall. It used to be a way of knowing all of the students. Of course with only 400 students on the campus, you knew everybody. When you walked across the campus well you spoke to just about everybody, including the faculty too. The faculty - you played ping pong with Prather, with Nicholson. You played tennis with Samuelson and you went to the dances - the formal dances you didn’t - in my case a couple times we exchanged dances with President McConnell and his wife. They were there. It was a different, different attitude and we were respected. We looked up to some of us as leaders. At the least the people I knew did. We had - we had lots of fun. There were lots of little incidents that probably I shouldn’t tell but I was playing tennis one evening after school behind Sue Lombard Hall and played with Nicholson and Samuelson and those two guys had about the worst record for temper on the field - on campus and I was playing with a fellow by the name of Arnold Bonney. Arnold Bonney was practically a professional tennis player. He was good so we were doing all right. Dr. Samuelson muffed one and he threw his tennis racket and it went through one of the windows in the back of Sue Lombard Hall. (laughs) So there were some things that were very interesting. We - some of the things that probably - I revealed them to my dad in his late years and realized that I was putting him into a state of shock: But one night Brooks Bouillon, whose father was on the Board of Trustees - so we weren’t exactly innocent. We went out here to a farm where the Tillmans lived a we got a cow and we let her in and we tied her up in Munson Hall on the stairway and they liked that. We proceeded - Brooks and I proceeded to hang a red lantern on the top of the flag pole there on Barge Hall one night and there was a gentleman who patrolled the campus with the name of Balyeat and Balyeat was apparently some place and he noticed the activity at the top of the tower. So he came up and rather then getting involved with the whole thing, he just took the ladder down. (laughs) So about 2:00 in the morning we were on top trying to attract the attention from somebody down there. ‘Come put the ladder up’ And finally Eugene George was coming home. George had a girlfriend, Mary, lived down there in one of the apartments and he was coming home at 1:30 in the morning and we got his attention and he came up and put the ladder back up for us. We got down. So there were events like that that made the sojourn here very interesting and very delightful you might say. We had - we had fun and that is - seemed to me there were students here who at times had problems with depression because of finances and we used to try to help them as much as we could to get them going to games and things like that. I remember a couple of boys, ?, you may remember the name. We were wondering about them one time, if they were having financial problems. I don’t know that they were but - but we looked around and we again took care of each other. Another interesting aspect of it in the 400 students here, there was two students who owned cars. I look at the parking lot out here today and its quite a change. I think some of them own two cars out here today the way they are. But Andy Anderson from Seattle had a Model A and Jim Smith had a Model T. Those were the two cars on campus. In 1937 we came to a crucial football game between Cheney and Ellensburg, Eastern Washington and Central Washington, and we went to the business office and asked if we could get - if we could get somebody to give us a bus for us to go take the band to Cheney. We had a pep band. Jim Smith directed sometimes and some of the other students directed it but it was about a 20 piece band and we wanted to take it to Cheney and there wasn’t enough budget in the school budget to get us to Cheney on a bus so the 20 people went to Cheney in Andy Anderson’s Model A and Jim Smith’s Model T with our instruments. And we got there in time to play for the game and we got home after midnight that night coming home but we made it and everybody chipped in for the gas and we made the trip. That was a - we didn’t think of spending money in those days. We’d do it ourselves or we did without. We were our own entertainment. We didn’t hire people to come in. Our dances were usually local bands that we would get to play for us. Sometimes they got paid and sometimes they didn’t. As I say, our social events at school were very primary in those days because they - kids didn’t have enough money to seek outside entertainment. They didn’t go off campus so much. They were right here and they enjoyed it here. One of the interesting things, we had - our classes started at eight in the morning like they do now and there was a period at noon when it was fairly inactive on campus and then they usually went until about five in the evening. I really didn’t - it seemed like I didn’t ? but of course I did but until I came up to school here I didn’t realize so much that there wasn’t school on Saturday up here because all of the faculty came down here to the campus on Saturday. If you wanted to go in for a conference with Dr. McRae or Joe Trainor or Sam uelson, in those days you needed to come down here on Saturday and find him some place. Either in the library or someplace else here on campus until about noon they’d be on campus. My dad had the shop open and kids that had projects that were doing things over there, they’d come down and work all day on Saturday. My dad came home at regular time on Saturday afternoon. That gave me the impression in high school that they had school up there six days a week but he was up there the whole time.

Smith: Did you work part time to help finance your expenses?

Hogue: I worked in the summers.

Smith: Summers.

Hogue: Yes. The first summer out of high school I worked on a Pautzke photo lab. I did all of their processing and printing. It was six days a week and I enjoyed it because I’d get down there at 7:00 in the morning. By noon I was pretty well caught up and just take those that came in throughout the day. I worked there until late in August 1935 and the geological survey was doing some work up here north of town and I waslucky enough to have a contact with them and I was hired in late August to work as a rodman in their survey crew. So I worked the fall of ‘35 up till school started surveying. In ‘36 I worked for the cannery from the day school was out until the day school started. In ‘37 I worked for the geological survey the whole year. I went to school here until the end of spring quarter in 1938. I had been told by several people that over in Seattle - about a branch of the University of Southern California that was - had been formed to teach aeronautics. So I wrote to them and they wrote back and asked if I wanted to do some of the work at home and it I did that I should name an instructor or a teacher at Central Washington who would monitor it and watch my study habits and be my teacher here. Dr. Loren Sparks, I talked to him and he volunteered to do it. He was my advisor and monitor while I started in the - right after March I think it was in ‘38 and then I worked up until September here and then I went to Southern California and graduated down there in March of ‘39. I - when I graduated I wanted to come back to Seattle - back to the Northwest. I got a little note that one of the supervisors out at Lockheed wanted to talk to me so I went out and talked to him out at Burbank and before I got through he had talked me into joining Lockheed. I got hired on at Lockheed at $.37 and hour which was better than the $30 an hour they were paying everybody else it seemed like. I worked there about two months and I asked them if I could have a long weekend to go to Seattle and see the folks and come over here. I went to Seattle and got to Seattle at - I think it was Sunday morning and came over here and Monday morning I was at Boeing at 7:00 to see what they had and at 3:00 I was taking a physical for the Boeing company. I had been hired. My tool box was in Burbank and I never went back to get it. I wrote a letter to Lockheed and told them the work didn’t interest me enough. I was down at a meeting in Ontario, California in 1979 and one of the fellows I graduated with from Southern California was Superintendent of Lockheed in Ontario and he invited me in for dinner with four other fellows and this was in ‘78 so it would be about almost 39 years later since I left down there and at the table they had my tool box. I couldn’t get away from it. I think that the - one of the things I enjoyed most at Central. I look back and thought, ‘Well when did I study?’ because there was always something that was non-academic going on that I was involved in. We had a group here called the Knights of the Claw and in 1930- late ’35, I - a fellow by the name of Joe Chioti and Fred Maxwell asked me if I wanted to join the Knights of the Claw, so I did. I already - in 1937 I was elected do-gooder, President of the Knights of the Claw. At that time I got a hold of the national organization, Intercollegiate Knights and we became a member of the Intercollegiate Knights. As I remember that was when Washington State University came over here and initiated us into the - as members and you bet you we initiated University of Portland and we got them into it too. But the Knights of the Claw was a lot like being in Kiwanis. It was all volunteers work and there was always too much to do. You had everything - we worked at the football games and the basketball games and the track meets and we even held a dance - the Sweetheart’s Dance or something. I can’t remember the name of it but we participated in a lot of activities on the campus here which I look back and feel kind of sorry for the kids today because they don’t seem to have those fun things to do that we had. It was interesting. We had - the faculty backed us all the way. Dr. Sparks was our advisor. We could - we could help on anything. They were always glad to call on us and we were glad to do it and the amazing thing was we had lots of volunteer help. We’d - we had 25 members in the club and we’d have 24 of them out there. They’d be ready to go and that was one of the highlights of my career here. I - classes that I really liked - I liked Professor Stevens’ Psychology classes. I - Dorothy Dean’s Biology and Bacteriology classes I enjoyed because there was a lot of practical things that we worked on. I enjoyed Hal Holmes and his lectures on politics, economics and where the hell are we going and general life. He was - I don’t know if you remember Ham, the big black dog he had that used to sit under his desk in class?

Howard: Yes.

Hogue: People used to sit there and watch that dog more than they did Hal I think. Selden Smyser, I enjoyed him very much. We used to have a lot of after hour conversations with him in which his philosophies and his attitudes were remarkably expressed and the students who were in on those enjoyed them because he - he spoke in a way that we could understand. We didn’t always agree with him but we knew what he was talking about. Also in those days we were in the early days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Selden Smyser was very skeptical of Roosevelt and his politics and his method of working on the economy. Hal Holmes’ attitude was that Roosevelt was all right but some of the people that were working for him couldn’t hit a bull in the face with a plate of beans. That was the words he used. But the - I thought that the people on the campus where definitely some partiality to political parties. You could see that - I thought they were very open. They explained a lot of things that I remember today. They explained how things worked and how they don’t work. We didn’t - we didn’t look at the way the students today look at - we didn’t look at the government with suspicion. We were innocent. We believed that the government was hones and we believed that. We believed in the politicians at that time. Some of them we didn’t but there was a different attitude. And then we had - we had an election here on campus. The Knights of the Claw ran the ballot boxes and Roosevelt won by a landslide. Which was interesting too because so many of our students were from very conservative agricultural type families and from the lower valley and the town of Kennewick and they tended to lean more towards the republican side of things than they did the democrat. We had a definite landslide for Roosevelt in our election here, two or three days before the original election which Hal Holmes made quite a deal about.

Smith: Now, Prater, a while ago you mentioned anticipating problems at Central because your father was a professor. Did those problems ever materialize?

Hogue: No, no they didn’t. I think that he had a little bit of apprehension because

I didn’t study as hard as I should and he would have like to have seen my grades a little higher than they were and I think I got on the honor roll a couple of times when I tried. The rest of the time at the end of the quarter I went to ? office and said, ‘Well I’ll try to do better next quarter.’ The thing that my dad related to me later, which I appreciated, was that he wasn’t so worried about my grades but he said he noticed a maturity change that came over me while I was here because I learned to accept responsibility fully and was active in the student body affairs and one time I was - the last quarter! was here I was Junior Class President and things like that which he thought were in some ways much more important I think than getting A’s. In high school I was - I look back at it and I worked on the yearbook and things like that - the orchestra and band but I didn’t participate in the student body activities like I did after I got up here. He was pleased with that. He thought it was a good change. I look back now and I played in the city band. It was cowboy band and most of the members of the band were up here too and we used to pick a day, Wednesday or Thursday, and wear our cowboy hats to class and about the only one that ever noticed them was Professor Hinch. He always had a remark. I think generally that it was an enjoyable time. I don’t look back like some kids look back - I didn’t have a lot of time to spend and money. The availability of friendship and I look back on it and it was really something. Very interesting. I’ve always been interested in Central. It’s kind of home to me.

Smith: Do you recall any of your friends being married students? Were there many on campus at that time?

Hogue: No.

Smith: No.

Hogue: I don’t remember anyone that was married. There were some that had gone together in high school that came here. Palo and Hagg, remember H-a-g-g from Aberdeen? They’d gone together in high school. But I don’t remember any that were married.

Smith: Do you recall any particular campus problems with student conduct such as are current in America now with narcotics and too much alcohol?

Hogue: First I’ll take the alcohol. Alcohol on this campus was a sure way of being kicked out of school. I can remember at the dances over in the gym of Hal Holmes being the first one in the reception line and if you came in there with anything on your breath other than halitosis you were turned around and back out. I can remember that one time somebody reported that there was some beer in Andy Anderson’s car, a case of beer or some bottles and Hal Holmes went over there himself and looked in the car to see if the beer was there and it wasn’t there, fortunately. But I think he probably would have kicked Andy out of school if he’d had beer. There was a place over there where Lind Hall is now called Dad Straights and that was about the only place that students smoked on campus or near the campus. Some of the faculty, and I thought about it today, used to go out on this step on the sidewalk and sit there and smoke during a break. You couldn’t smoke on campus. You didn’t smoke in buildings or anything else like that. But some of the - the attitude towards smoking, especially girls at that time and I hope other people remember it as I do but when you went into Dad Straights and you saw some girl in there smoking why she was kind of automatically put into a little different character than the rest of the girls. As Professor Stevens used to say, ‘A little bit fast.’ But smoking was not a problem. Smoking in the dorm was a sure way to get out of it. If they caught you smoking in the dorm why - I know my girlfriend and later my wife lived in Kamola Hall and they had one gal one day with a cigarette in the restroom and somebody smelled it and before they got through why the dean of women was there. They made quite an issue of her smoking in the dorm. I don’t remember any drinking. Now I’m sure it went on some place but it sure as heck didn’t go on around the campus. We had - we had parties down at Ashfall Park where a bunch of students would go down on the Naches and have a wiener roast or a marshmallow roast or something else but there was never any beer or anything else. We’d have - we had a school picnic down there several years at Ashfall Park and there was no rowdiness or anything else. It was a very - something you were proud to attend. It was not a - our faculty had a different attitude. Hal was a pretty straight arrow and he didn’t want any students and neither did Margaret Holmes, his wife. Dr. McConnell was the same way. They didn’t want to get something started that would get out of control on campus. It didn’t.

Smith: Do you have any memory, Prater, of any kind of campus activities that developed into marches or boycotts or protests such as we have seen in the last 25 years on most college campuses? Students Rights? Women’s Rights?

Hogue: I don’t remember any. I don’t remember one. I know - I can remember at one time I heard rumors that the people who were working in the dining hall, the students, were going to strike because they were only getting $.22 an hour or $.26 an hour or something like that for their work over there and they thought they should be getting more and nothing ever came of it. Nothing ever happened. They didn’t get a raise. They didn’t strike. No I think there was a different attitude towards - you might say rebellion in those days. Number one is you’re paying the family money down here to go to school and there wasn’t a lot of that money. There was a different look on money and the cost of things. And you had to get an education to get a job and you didn’t want to sacrifice those - that opportunity by doing something that was counterproductive to the community. So I don’t remember any of those.

Smith: Since the 1950’s there has been a campus police force here. Was there any kind of security force on campus at that time?

Hogue: We had a fellow by the name of Belliet who took care of the furnace at the heating plant and walked around the campus once or twice at night.

Smith: A night watchman?

Hogue: A night watchman type deal. He didn’t carry a gun. He didn’t carry any protection at all; he just walked around and would look and that’s the only security I know we had in those days.

Howard: We’re going to stop temporarily.

Hogue: Am I doing all right?

Howard: You’re doing great.

Hogue: One more thing that I should mention that - on this campus here which tended to help bring students together and to help was that each winter we had a winter ski picnic and the city merchants put on a feed. The hamburgers and the coffee and the pop and everything else and the city people plus professors and everybody else drove the students in their own cars up to Robinson Canyon and we had a big picnic up there and we used to have three or four hundred students turn out for that picnic plus just about every merchant in town that could get up there with their hamburgers and hot dogs and coffee and it was quite an event. You probably remember going to some of those. That tended to make the school more friendly too because the kids got together up there and they hadn’t seen each other very much down here and we just came for the day and were life long friend after that.

Smith: Do you recall any particular association or relationship between Central as - or Washington State Normal School and the major institutions at Pullman and at Seattle? Were there jealousies? Were we competing for funding with them? What was the relationship? Do you remember?

Hogue: Well I remember a number of times I went with my dad and Nick Nicholson and some of the football players, Pill and some of the others to a Washington game over at Seattle and there was not so much friction, there was a little bit of jealousy because of the enormous backing and assets that the university had behind it and we were going - at times went to think that we here once in a while? think that they were going to close Ellensburg. Maybe they won’t keep it going. Taxes were hard to get and money was hard to get. Budgets were low and I think that feeling was a little bit preeminent in my dad and Nicholson. Nicholson looked at the athletic department at the University of Washington and his $500 he had over here didn’t look like much of a dent compared to what they were spending over there on stadiums and seats and things like that. As students, I think all of us would like to have been able to go to the University of Washington. I wouldn’t trade my years at Central for any years at - but that was the finishing point for a profession. That was what you looked at that school for. You didn’t look at the University of Washington like you looked at Ellensburg Normal. Ellensburg Normal you came to get an education and make friends and learn something about life. There you were honing your profession. Engineering, doctors, lawyers. That’s the way the students looked at it. But I don’t think there was jealousy. I think there was envy rather than jealousy. Washington State - we looked at that as more of a career in the agricultural industry. They had their various stations throughout the state where they were doing experimental work and they was interest in being able to get into that type of work but again there was envy not - When the Knights of the Claw became a member of the Intercollegiate Knights I contacted one of the students at Washington State University and of course I don’t know how many they - they probably had five or six thousand students. We probably had three or four hundred. We were just a little dot out here in Kittitas Valley but they were very very nice to us. I think the dean of men wrote us a letter and welcomed us into the Knights of the Claw. We felt like we were part of the unit. There’s so many little things that I think made the sojourners here a very happy experience in my life. I’ve run into people who didn’t. They were quite the opposite. But I look upon my career here, my sojourner here, being one of the happiest times of my life. I enjoyed every minute of them.

Smith: Now Prater, because you had an interesting and quite a special career, I want to make sure we get it on tape that the little boy that came to Central ended up working for a gigantic firm in a rather important capacity. Would you review your years with the Boeing Company leading up to what I’m alluding to?

Hogue: Okay, I - as I say I took a few days out down in Lockheed. I only worked there about three weeks and I came up to Seattle on a Monday morning in March of 1939. No, Wednesday morning 1939. The 14th I think. Went down to Boeing. It was raining. The line up for employment was a little over three blocks long. You’d stand in it from the employment office there at Plant 1 down the Street and up onto the highway. I would guess that there was 1500 people there at 7:00 in the morning looking for work. I got in this line and it took me about 45 minutes before I’d worked up to the window and I told him that I had written him a letter with my resume and he asked, ‘When?’ and he handed me a card. And he said, ‘Fill out this card.’ And I did and he said, ‘We don’t have anything today,’ but he said, ‘can you come in tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll come back tomorrow.’ So the next morning, the 17th of March 1939, I went back and got in line and worked my way up to the window. Gave him my name and he reached back and got the card and said, ‘Come on back.’ I was hired by Boeing on that day. It was quite an event because I was- my life long ambition was to work for Boeing. I had - fortunately my dad on several occasions had taken me through the plant. He had some people over there that knew some people who got us in to look at it and I was fascinated with the industry. I took my physical that afternoon. The next morning I went to work at the employment office and they took me in the back of the pickup in the pouring down rain and another fellow who I’ve long lost track of and hauled us down to Plant 2 which was a couple miles down by Boeing field. Boy it was - we walked into that big building and it was full of half made airplanes and my heart was really pounding. I was excited. I was introduced to a foreman by the name of Leonard Anderson and he took me upstairs in wing jigs and introduced me to a lead man by the name of Gene Hansel. Gene Hansel and I still talk to each other on the phone on weekends. He is 84 years old and we worked together for a couple years. I went to work with wing jigs on day shift working for Gene. He was Director there. In three weeks they asked me to go on night shift. There were only about four people on night shift and - doing jobs - so I went on night shift. That’s when they asked me to teach sheet metal. The other high event there in the wing shop was the summer of 1940. They came up one night and asked me if I would work with three other people on an airplane that would be built for Howard Hughes. The problem was to rebuild the ailerons, the aileron insulation on the?. We were to go to work on Friday evening and the bargain was that if we worked as long as we wanted to but they wanted the job done on Monday morning. So I found myself more or less having to lead this group of four people. We worked all night Friday night. Came back on Saturday afternoon and worked till Sunday morning. Came back Sunday afternoon and finished up about 2:00 in the morning Monday morning. So they were - I had made my niche because they got it done. Two months later I walked into the shop. We had 209 people in the shop at the time, both shifts. There was a gloom in the air. I asked Gene what was wrong and he said, ‘Well’ - he’d been there 11 years at that time and he said, ‘I got a pink slip today. They’re laying everybody off in the shop. They don’t have any work. The wings are all done.’ So during the evening I was a little bit wondering what will I do and at 11:30 when the whistle blew nobody had given me a pink slip yet. So as I walked down past the foreman well he handed me a slip and he said, ‘We’re transferring you up to the Template Shop. Do you mind going on graveyard shift?’ I said, ‘Hell no. You just tell me where and I’ll be there.’ I worked four months in Plant 1 in the Template Shop which was good experience. At that time they made templates for the Boeing Clipper and I had been working on the B-17 and the Shadow Liner. In January of 19 - no in December of ‘40, I got an order to come back to Plant 2 in the wing shop in which there were 200 some people there once before, there were six of us in the shop and our job was to tool the shop up, get the place ready for production of the B-17 wings. One of the highlights in that one was about a year later when we were in production and we were building roughly one wing a week. We were making an airplane a week - four airplanes a month. One of the highlights, one afternoon I was working on a day shift and the foreman came and got me and we went up to the engineering and a fellow by the name of General Knudson and ? was there. There were about 15 of us in that room. I don’t know how many groups they talked to but there were 15 there. And he told us, ‘Gentleman we’re going to ask you to do something that is very near impossible. What we’d like to double the production of B17s. Four a week to eight a week.’ So we walked out of there, why, Leonard Anderson our general foreman slapped me on the back and he said, ‘I’m assigning this job to you.’ I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know where to start. But anyway we went to work and had a couple of good fellows that worked with me and worked along side of me and between the two of us - four of us in the spring of 1942 after Pearl Harbor we were turning out 16 airplanes a day. Sixteen B-17’s a day. If we had a few days of bad weather they had problems on Boeing Field. No place to park them. We’d gone from one a week, one a day and four a week, to 16 a day. It was a very very interesting job. One of the things that endured my interest in Boeing and the interest in Boeing of me was I had been monitoring this building of some wings for us down at Plant 3 which was the old fork plant a mile down the road towards Tacoma and the - another fellow was monitoring the building of jigs up at Plant 2. So we had templates that we used to match the jigs and the spars and everything. We brought these spars from Plant 2 at about 4:00 in the afternoon. The first ones they had turned out. Took them by the crane and put them in the jigs and they wouldn’t fit by about a quarter of an inch, half an inch. I saw myself tool box in hand, walking down Marginal Way. We couldn’t figure it out and so I stayed there all night that night trying to figure out where in the hell we had made the mistake. Well we went to Plant 3 and looked at it and I called up Anderson at home and I told him, Everything checks out. I can’t see why it happened.’ Well, he said, ‘Boy, somebody’s made a mistake.’ So about 4:00 in the morning I went back and I said I’m going out there and I’m going to measure those spars again. They were in the jigs fitting perfectly. Well it turned out that I said ? and a few other things that night. By morning I determined that the tide coming in the Duwamish River was affecting the floor of the Boeing plant. (laughs) And it affected it enough to put those jigs off a quarter of an inch and the tide went out and changed they’d slip back and fell into place.

Smith: I’ll be darned.

Howard: We’re out of time. What do you want to do? Do you want to end this now?

Smith: You’re the cameraman.

Howard: I’m afraid we’ll have to. We ran out of recording material.

Hogue: In 1943 I had some interesting problems during ‘42 and ‘43. They came up one night - one afternoon. They said, ‘We’re going to hire some women to work in the shops. We don’t know how they work. Would you take the first five and see how they work out?’ I didn’t think women belonged in the factory but I said sure. But they worked out fine. No problem. They were very good. The only problem I had was there was more jealousy between women than there were the men. I soon found out that another had gotten a raise, you heard about it in a hurry because they were down there wondering, ‘Why didn’t I get one?’ We got those started and then women were then hired throughout the wing shop. And about two months later - three months later they came up and said we’ve got another problem for you. I said, ‘What’s that?’ Leonard said, ‘Well, its been suggested to take the people from Steilacom and bring them up here to a place where they can live together and maybe we can use some of their bodies down here to help us to build airplanes.’ So I got five fresh people out of Steilacom who came to work for me and the job was to evaluate them and to see if they could do the job and unfortunately there was - you had to do - you had to do a little preplanning but you could find lots of jobs that you could tell them what to do and show them and they could do it. They would find out. I often laugh. I had a fellow by the name of Casper. Casper Foulchek, something like that. He was a very nice fellow but he was definitely - had a mental problem. We worked until 12:30 at night and at 12:30 why everybody stopped and Casper didn’t. I’d listen and - up there in the jig and the drill would still be going. I’d go up there and find Casper and he was up there drilling holes. ‘Casper it’s time to quit.’ He didn’t pay attention to me so I’d pull his plug out of the wall. He turned around and God, he’d just cut me off like - and its time to quit, time to go home. So he wound up his motor. I said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ and would walk down the stairs. Well five minutes later I’d hear the drill motor running again. So I turned out the lights. We could here the drill motor still running up there and we thought hell we better get up there or he’d drill holes in everything up there because he can’t see. But he wasn’t up there - was just standing there holding the motor. Casper was one of the problems we had because he wouldn’t quit working. He worked all of the time. But the rest of them, they were different. They were a different bunch of people. Very sincere. They wanted to help. They believed in all of the war news. They thought they were helping to win it which was good. It was better than some of the other ones we had that wouldn’t show up everyday and things like that. In 1943 things were going pretty good and I was getting ready to convert to the B- 29 wing shop. We were planning the wing shop in Renton. I happened to be lucky enough to be able to sit in on some of the planning sessions. I went to work that afternoon at 4:00. I walked over to see what I had in my mailbox in the foreman’s office - the general foreman’s office - and he looked at me kind of funny and I said, ‘What’s the matter.’ And he said, ‘We’ve got to go down and see Nick Carter, the superintendent.’ I said, ‘You need me? He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, “He’ll tell you why.’ I said, ‘What have I done?’ I thought of all of the things I couldn’t have done or didn’t do. ? So about 6:00 we went over to Nick Carter’s office and we walked in and he looked at me kind of funny and he said, ‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you.’ And I thought, they don’t fire people out here like that. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, Beale, the senior vice-president just sent us a letter that he wants you up in Burien.’ He said, ‘We can’t buck it and that’s it.’ He said, ‘I’ve been to Lowden, the vice-president of manufacturing.’ And he said, ‘He wouldn’t go against Beale.’ Beale was the last guy in the hall. So on Monday morning I reported to engineering and Beale took me down to the service department and I was immediately assigned to the B-29 flight school, and the B-i 7 maintenance school. So I went to school for three months and was sent out on my own to Alexander, Louisiana. I’d never been on an air base and never been near an armed B-17 and everything else. It didn’t take long until I had been. I went down there four months. Had three accidents while we were there. I participated in the investigation of all of those. Went back to Seattle and we had an accident down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Somebody in the second Air force hired Boeing and they said they wanted me down there. That was the start of my career in accident investigation. I went from there to Kingman, Arizona for a couple months to help with some of the flight crew training problems. I didn’t - it wasn’t in flight instruction. It was more flight preparation and understanding. The way to fly an airplane to reduce the drag and give it better range and things like that. Came back to Boeing and was assigned to the handbook unit and I worked there about two months and Beale called me up one afternoon and went up to his office and I figured well something good or bad is going to happen here. He said, ‘I’ve got a job down in Gordon Air Force Base. Contracted with the Air Force. We will provide a technical person to assist the Air Force in accident investigation for Boeing airplane products, and he said, ‘Lockheed is there and Douglas is there and all the rest of them.’ It turned out that there were 72 contractors there. Boeing was one of them. So I moved my family to San Bernino, California and the last day I was there we had a real send off. Beale called me up and said, ‘This guy you’re working down there for is General Bertrandis’ And he said, ‘He’s an SOB.’ He said, ‘Be careful of him.’ He said, ‘He’lltake advantage of you every chance he gets.’ He said, ‘I sold airplanes with him in China and I was selling airplanes for Boeing and he was selling them for Douglas.’ He said, ‘We just about cut each others throats.’ Well I got down there and got acquainted with Douglas and General Bertrandis. He was one of the best friends I ever had in the Air Force. He was really a great guy and Beale admitted it. He had overstated the situation a little bit. I was there two and a half years. Came back and was assigned to Air Worthiness and Accident Investigation at Boeing. I had the Air Worthiness title from 1954 until 1965. And then they took it just to Accident Investigation from there to ‘81 I was in that capacity. Started out I was one person, a one person department. It was - it was a good job. I look back now and I think some of the things that were done for me and things to help me. In about ‘70 I was assigned two engineers to help with me and we carried the load at Boeing. The three of us. Now I get retired AP’s calling me up and saying, ‘What in the hell is going on over there. That office you used to have got nine people in it now.’ But they have a different role, different type of work. I worked at that and enjoyed it very much. I think I made 16 round trips across the North Atlantic. Was in South America. I was in Japan, Alaska, Newfoundland, Greenland. Never got to Russia. Was kind of, they didn’t use our products over there. (laughs) I enjoyed it very much. There was a lot of people I enjoyed working with. A lot of people that I look back now and I didn’t realize at the time like William Paterson, the guy that organized United Airlines. He was the first President. He was President for a long time. Carlson who was President of United Airlines, I got to be friends with him. I was - the people in Pan America were especially good friends and I met a lot of the people who pioneered flights all over the world through Pan America who I had read about in magazines and books. It was quite a thrill to meet them. I was sitting in a meeting one afternoon and Jim Wall, Vice President for Operations for Pan Am said, ‘Did you ever meet Charlie Lindberg?’ And I said. ‘No.’ He said, ‘Come on. He’s right down the hall.’ So we went down the hall and they said he just went over into the accounting department. We went over there and we never caught up with him so I missed Charlie Lindberg by a minute. But I was also in Wall’s office on another trip when the spot light came on and the girl said, ‘It’s Mrs. Lindberg and she would like to have an airplane to take her husband’s body to Hawaii,’ and Jim Wall said, ‘We’ll send you an airplane.’ So he had the seats removed from the first class so she could have a place for the casket and a place to rest up there but the rest of the family had to ride in the back of the airplane and they flew to Hawaii, which was kind of touching because I had missed him by just a minute. But a few of the other old timers, fellow that flew with Bruce Elderly two weeks after Lindberg landed off the coast of - not Spain but near France. What’s that other country?

Smith: Portugal.

Hogue: Portugal. It was rescued and hauled into Paris. Harold, he and Ruth Elderly. I was in Paris with him one day and he took me up on the balcony where he received the welcome of the Paris people for his attempt to fly across the - he almost made it. He was within 30 miles of shore and ran out of fuel.

Smith: Is that right?

Hogue: And there were other people that I got to know. I used to - a kid in high school I used to go up near the Fay rain station and sit and talk to the operator up there and listen to the airplanes going over head at night and a fellow by the name of Frank Bus, the pilot Frank Bus, and I thought he must be a real hero. So a few years later working in Southwest Airlines I met Frank Bus. He was Vice-President of Operations but he was just an ordinary guy. So there were a lot of those. I had a number of honors that I - I was back in New York and received a call from Mr. Allen, the President of the company and he asked the secretary did the talking - if I could be in Miami in two days and I wondered what the deal was and she said, ‘Well, he has been invited to come to Miami, he and Lola Fields, and we’re going to have all of the top generals in the Air Force there for a meeting and they had invited some of the presidents from some of the companies. He wanted me, Beale wanted me to meet some of these guys so I’d know who they were. So I had the honor of being down in Miami with all of the top men from Lemay on down. I think we had a few one star generals but mostly four, three, and two star - and one and it was quite an honor to be there. So there were a lot of highlights. I think one of the - I don’t know whether this will be appropriate to tell - we had an airplane accident which occurred in Lake Michigan. A 727 in the summer of ‘65 and it was in several hundred feet of water. We located it. But anyway the company told me - called me and said that it is very important that we find everything you can because this is the first 727. They’d only been in service a year and we don’t want something coming up here that’s going to put a bugaboo on this airplane so do everything you can to get all of the information you can. So after about three and a half months of writing and waiting for light on Lake Michigan on everything from row boats lo work boats, 170 foot work boats, we had not come up with anything and I came down there one morning in my hotel there was a bunch of NTST and airline people sitting at a table in the coffee shop. They motioned me to come over. The head of the NTST said, ‘We’ve got a problem. We’ve run out of money to search. Can’t take boats on the station.’ So it looked like we were going to need about a million and a half dollars to keep this up for the time that we need. Would Boeing put up $500,000 as United will and so would the government and I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to find out.’ Sunday morning at 7:00 in Chicago, it’s kind of a rough time to call back to Seattle and ask for $500,000. If you knew who to call. I went back to my room and I debated a little bit and I thought well 7:00, it’s 5:00. I’m not going to call now because I’d get a definite no and hung up on. But the next thing to do was to find out who - who to call. I knew that if I called the vice-president that I was working for that he would probably call 911 after it was over. He would be one of the victims. So I had to figure out somebody else to call and I had a very good friend in the Treasurer’s office in Plant 2 50 I thought well, I’ll call him. So promptly at 8:00 which was 6:00 back there I called his home and his wife in a very sleepy voice said, ‘Hello.’ And I said, ‘Is Annison there.’ And she said, ‘He’s on his boat up in the Aleutian Islands.’ I said, ‘Good, I don’t have to ask him.’ So I hung up and said, ‘Well there’s one down.’ The clocks ticking up to 0 and I’m going to have to come back with a yea or a nay. So finally I decided well, I know John ?, the president of the Boeing airplane company in commercial planes, I’ll call him. So at 6:30 his time I called him and I knew John real well. We had been on a number of trips. He answered the phone. It sounded like he’d been up working or doing something and I thought through my mind how do you say this? John I need $500,000. I knew he had a little sense of humor. He said, ‘Put it on your credit card.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s not that. We’ve run into a problem with the search back here and we’re out of funds and United and the government each put up $500 and they want to know if Boeing would put up $500.’ He said, ‘How do I send it.’ It was so much easier than I thought it was going to be that I practically collapsed after I hung up.

Smith: It’s an honor to you that they trusted you that much.

Hogue: Yes, a number of people have said that. There was no questions asked. But there were other things, other scrapes I got into. I went to work one morning and General Lemay, he said, ‘Prater, I’ve got a problem.’ He said, ‘Well, when we had that accident down at Burns, Oregon,’ he said, ‘Boeing sent a team from Wichita.’ And he said, ‘They were searching out there in the desert and during the search they called out the boy scouts. So at the end of the day of the search Boeing came in with a truck full of ice and beer and the Churches of Burns, Oregon went up in arms against SAC because the boy scouts had nothing to drink but beer and he was a pretty straight forward guy. And he said, ‘I don’t like that on SAC’s back.’ He said, ‘I want to know who at Boeing did it I think Boeing ought to know.’ And he said, ‘Now to help you out I’m going to send Russ Schlee and an aide to General Lemay out there this afternoon.’ Russ was a well known boat driver on Lake Washington and a colonel at the time in SAC. And he said, ‘He’ll clue you in on all of the details.’ So at the end of the day I had a head full of facts and no place to go with them. I wanted to know who to report it to. I’ll just run up to Alan’s office and say, ‘Hey, the matter is much clearer and send it out.’ But anyway, I talked to some people. While we were talking the president of Wichita came in the office so I was asked to tell him the story and that was the last I heard of it. I never heard of it. I had a lot of people coming around saying, ‘By gosh if you ever do that to me I’ll kick their butt.’ Apparently there was something that went on down in Wichita that I was never made aware of.

Smith: What was your last duty with the Boeing company before you retired.

Hogue: Last duty for about the last two years was to represent the Boeing company with the insurance companies and the legal people. Both in lawsuits and in preparation for lawsuits. The insurance lawyers from New York, London, Chicago, their headquarters were in my office when they came to Seattle and I was the one to get their people in there and the data they wanted so that they could prepare case to defend Boeing. Boeing had an outside law office, Cory Perkins in Seattle. They’ve been there for years and they were key working for me. They had about five lawyers up there. One of them in my office (tape ran out)