Oral History Interview with Albert Donaldson, April 14, 2009 Page: 3

                                
my dad picked up the newspaper one morning and there had been a tornado in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama and it tore up the little town across the river from Tuscaloosa called
North Port. And, dad figured that they'd need a lot of carpenters down there so he
jumped the car and went to Tuscaloosa with his tool box. And sure enough he got a full
time job there and he kind of liked. Tuscaloosa so that's where we stayed. That's how
come we were living in Tuscaloosa because of a tornado that hit the place.
I went to school, the public school there, all those years up til junior high school and of
course the war was looming on horizon and we moved to Tampa, Florida because dad
wanted to do war work. This is right after Pearl Harbor. We had come home from
church one Sunday and dad had all us kids come inside and sit around the radio and listen
to the reports coming in. We heard the speech by President Roosevelt on the radio to
congress. So dad had us all listen to that, too, and we heard the Day of Infamy speech by
President Roosevelt.
We moved on to Tampa right away cause dad figured that everything was going to be
frozen like it was in World War I, and that we may not be able to travel and so forth and
then we moved down to Tampa, Florida and had trouble finding a place to live so we had
to move several times trying to find a place and finally dad bought a place which became
for sale and it was on North Orleans Avenue in Tampa, just north of Tampa. We lived

there during the war years. I milked cows as a job, extrajob and then I worked as a, well
I wanted to do war work so I got a job at Tampa Electric Company in the evening by
arranging my high school classes in the morning and then I could work 4 hours in the
afternoon winding armatures at Tampa Electric Company. I wound armatures there for, I
guess, about 6 months or something like that, and I told dad that I wanted to get in the

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