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Tape Oral History Mr. Sanford Hunt May 1993 I was born on the north end of Newark, New Jersey, Oct 18, 1915 where I stayed until 24 and went to California. (My father was in the newspaper business.) I was raised on a farm in California. I went to a 2-room school -8 grades. Each room had 4 grades, 4 rows of chairs and that was a grade---and 2 teachers. It worked out pretty well. So at the age of 14 I got a driver's license so I could drive to high-school which was allowed in California at that time if you had to drive. The State of California paid you for your gasoline and your mileage to go to school. Of course, you got as many friends to go with you as possible and then you took their checks as well at the end of the month. I hung around there until I got out of high-school except I missed a couple of years of school when I went off cowboying in Arizona by myself. Came back and graduated. There were a lot of things going on, ordinary things that people do when they graduate from high-school and are looking for a job--truck driving and things like that. This was depression time but I worked for Marian Hollands who had just built a golf course in Santa Cruz and she needed a truck driver and you had to have a special license in California to drive any kind of a truck. So I got one and worked for her for a year and then I went to navigation school in San Francisco, joined the naval reserve and they rated me as a radioman 3/c right away. I went to sea on the USS New Mexico and put myself on active duty--no pay and I stayed with that for about a month and a half or two months as a radio operator. I was in amateur radio first, I trained myself and got an amateur license. We lived out in the country and the radio was all hand key, there was no voice communication. We used Morse Code. That wa}s all it took to get me a rating in the naval reserve. In the navy you may be a 3rd class petty officer when I enlisted. I was a little awkward aboard ship the first time. I didn't know anything. I had no training, nothing whatsoever. In a month and a half went to sea again in a freighter and stayed until there was rate strike in California, the longshoremen went on strike and I got out of it then -- it was getting rough. Machine guns were set up in San Francisco along the harbor to quell the striking longshoremen and it was a little bit too much for me. That was in 1934.
A friend of mine from the golf course was going east to Colorado and I went with him and we cowboyed at his father's house. They paid me $30 a month retrievable from a vase on top of the mantle piece each month. It was a good adventure chasing cows -- this was at Redwing, Colorado near Gardner. You go to an ice cream social on Sunday, and they have a fiddle and you go to a dance at the school on Saturday night. This was on the edge of the mountains near the desert. I was still in the Naval Reserve, and went back to the east coast and went to work for a newspaper. Distributing the college newspapers--they gave me a job and I got mixed up with some pretty rough characters. Apparently the days of the Newhouse clan and the Annenbergs and the news and magazine distributors--it was a cut-throat business. It was a business where people were killed on a weekly basis if they got in the way of their competitors. It was just a bad time. I was in Newark at the time Dutch Schultz as machine gunned down in the cafeteria at Park Place in downtown Newark. I stayed with that for while and
The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Sanford Hunt. Hunt was born in Newark, New Jersey on 18 October 1915 and after graduating from high school in 1934, joined the Naval Reserve as a radioman. In October 1940 he resigned from the Navy Reserves and enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve. He was sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a radio operator, where he worked with Holland M. Smith. He was next transferred to the newly established Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and was trained as a cryptographer and cipher machine repairman. He describes his role in setting up and operating a radio transmitter station on Guadalcanal. While there, he worked closely with Major General Alexander Vandegrift and Brigadier General Gerald C. Thomas, Commanding General and Chief of Staff of the First Marine Division, respectively. The three of them were the only Marines on Guadalcanal authorized access to ULTRA message traffic (intelligence obtained by breaking encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter messages). Upon returning to Pearl Harbor he was given a field commission to second lieutenant. Hunt accompanied General Vandegrift to Noumea, New Caledonia as Special Assistant and Chief of Staff for Special Traffic and Messages, until Vandegrift was recalled to Washington as Commandant of the Marine Corps. His next assignment was as the Third Marine Division communications officer during the landing at Bougainville.
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