Well, today is February the 25th. This is Mike
Zambrano. I'm sitting here with Mr. Robert Goodman
in Austin, Texas. This interview is in support
of the Nimitz Education and Research Center,
Archives of the National Museum of the Pacific
War, Texas Historical Commission for the Preservation
of Historical Information related to this site.
And as I always start, can you please tell me
Where and when you were born?
I was born in Galveston, Texas, September the
3rd of 1921.
September the 3rd of 1921? Yeah.
September 3rd, of parents who were also both
born in Galveston.
Oh, OK.
So I go far back in Galveston.
Went through high school.
Oh, OK.
and then went to college at the Virginia
Military Institute.
That was in 1938, I graduated from high school.
I graduated from VMI in May of 1942,
just in time to take an active part in World
War II.
Can you tell me what your parents' names were?
My mother's name was Anna, Anna Butler, before
she married my father.
His name was, well I'm a junior, his name was
Robert Wilbur, W-I-L-B-U-R.
He went by Wilbur, Robert Wilbur Goodman.
They were pretty prominent in Galveston.
He was on the school board and potentate of the
Shrine Temple and president of the Rotary
Club and my mother was active.
She was on the board of the Orphan's Home and
Galveston was a small city at that time
and a very nice place to live.
It was, they called it the Playground of the South.
The Playground of the South.
Yes, it was a nice city to be raised in.
You spent most of your time on the beach or in
the water or whatever.
They had everything in Galveston.
You know, Galveston was not connected with the
mainland except by a causeway.
So we felt pretty free from all restrictions,
whether they be Texas law or otherwise.
So we had our own rules and we had our nightclub.
We had a very famous nightclub in Galveston
called the Balinese Room off over the ocean.
In fact, some Hollywood stars had been known to
go there to get married.
I wish I could remember their name, but they
were popular at the time.
So those are the conditions under which I went
to VMI, which is a very strict military
school and quite frankly changed my life considerably.
VMI was a great, great, great place too.
And I want to ask you more about that, but I
first wanted to ask you, since your father
held these positions, what did he do for a living?
He was a partner with a couple other guys in
the model laundry and linen supply, and
they supplied all the linen for all the hotels
and the Balinese room.
In fact, they had a monopoly for a long time.
They finally had a competition from another
linen supply.
And so it was a very successful operation as
far as that's when you didn't have a cleaner,
you didn't have a dryer and a washer at home,
you sent your clothes out to be washed.
Kind of like dry cleaners today.
And dry cleaners, yeah, they had all that.
But the linen supply was the important thing,
that was big business, particularly Galveston
as a tourist town, and lots of motels and hotels.
So they would send their linen to be given by him.
Was your mother educated?
I mean, were both your parents educated?
My father went to A&M a few years, but back
then you didn't necessarily have to have a
college degree to do something.
And I don't know all of his background, but he
worked, I think, for the telephone company.
And somehow he got connected with these people
that owned the Model Laundry in Linden.
My mother went to, I know she graduated from
high school.
I don't think she went to college.
How did your family...
You can Google.
It's funny, you're interviewing me.
They interviewed my father because he was one
of the last remaining people that went
through the hurricane of 1900.
And his interview is on Google if you Google
Wilbur Goodman.
So how did your family, well actually, I'm
getting ahead of myself, did you have brothers
and sisters?
I had one sister, Mary Louise.
She went to school in Virginia.
That's one of the reasons I guess I went to
Virginia, because she was four years older
than I was.
She went to school in Bristol, Virginia, called Sullins.
Was it just the two of you?
Your sister and yourself? Uh-huh.
How did your family fare during the Depression?
Well, fairly well, because the people still
needed laundry, the linen supply was still
in demand.
In fact, we have a home in Galveston that has
been pictured in the National Magazine
of Southern Living, I think, and the money that
they used to pay for that house, my father
withdrew from the bank one day before Roosevelt
closed the banks, if you remember, the banking holiday.
And so that was an interesting story in the
family for quite a while.
You stated before that you had graduated from
high school in Galveston and you go on to VMI.
I've never interviewed anyone who's gone to VMI.
Can you tell me a little bit about that, about VMI?
I'm sorry, you're talking about my sons?
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Can you tell me a little bit about your time at VMI?
Oh, my time at VMI, well, I did great-wise, I
did good.
The first year at VMI, you're a rat, so I got
through that period okay, and then decided
to study electrical engineering.
So when I went back to VMI my sophomore year,
they call it your third class year, that's
when I started studying engineering.
And I was my first-that year I was made a
corporal, which is the most you can do in
the sophomore year at that time.
In my last year I was a cadet lieutenant in the Corps.
I spent a lot of time studying.
I had a tough time with that engineering.
I made good grades, but it took a lot of study.
I didn't spend the time that normally I would
have in extra activities and that sort of thing.
I was there, you know, it's a two-day train
ride to get to Lexington, Virginia from Galveston,
And I didn't want to flunk out, and so I had a
priority with respect to grades and not
with respect to what you'd call public
relations aspect of going to college.
I made that up when I came back, because when I
got out of the service in 1946, I immediately
came up here to Austin and entered the
University of Texas in the MBA program. I was
going to
mix engineering with accounting and I wanted to
be a CPA. I forgot what we were talking about.
What asked you about VMI and you were telling
me about how you were trying to get a master
or an MBA?
Oh yeah.
And so when I came to Texas, of course Texas is
a completely different kind of university
than VMI, and I was always amazed at the difference.
I joined a fraternity and in fact I became
president of the fraternity my second year.
And I made good grades and I had a pretty good
time at the university, it's a nice place.
And I was very active after that with respect
to, I was a member of the advisory committee
for the dean of the business school.
I was made an associate of the accounting, what
do they call it, anyway, the faculty.
I was an associate of the accounting faculty.
And finally I got an award that I do like.
I have all these in my room if you want to see them.
I was made, they presented me with the
Outstanding Alumnus Award.
I did a lot of work as an alumnus in connection
with my firm.
I was in charge of recruiting new students.
And we would come to take it to the University
of Austin and I was stationed in, I was a
partner in the Houston office of my firm.
We would come and interview a hundred students easily.
Our firm was growing, and we were hiring a lot
of folks.
So in the process of that, I tried to establish
good relations with the professors, and so
I maintained a good line of communication with
the universities in order that I would
find out who the best students were, and those
were the ones I was trying to hire.
Just like you were at VMI when the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor, do you remember maybe
what you were doing or where you were when you heard?
Yeah, I remember it well.
I was, of course, a senior at that time, and as
a senior you get a lot of privileges that
you did not get any other year, one of which
you could spend the weekend elsewhere.
There were several girls' schools around.
Many times we would have formal dances and our
dates would come from Randolph-Macon or
Sweet Briar or Whatever, Mary Baldwin and Hollins.
And then we would go to their dances too.
And that weekend I had gone to the, I was at
Fairfax I think it was, Fairfax, Virginia.
Anyway, there's a girl's school somewhere
around there, and Saturday night we had been,
they had their dance, and I had, when I woke up
Sunday morning, I was walking down the
stairs in the home that I was staying at,
mostly we didn't stay in motels, we stayed
in homes, and they announced to me about Pearl Harbor.
Then the next morning, they called the Corps together.
We met in the hall, in the big room, and
listened to Roosevelt.
They had Roosevelt on the radio, so we listened
to him declaring war.
So we knew, of course, immediately what our
future held.
was in December and we were going to graduate
in May, so we knew immediately we were going
to go right into the service.
Q. But you finished your time at VMI before you -
A. Yes. We finished VMI. They did not change
the curriculum at all. I mean, everything
went along as normal. We did graduate, I think,
a week or two earlier than we would have otherwise.
That was the only change that I remember.
They were trying to get us into the service as
quickly as possible, and they succeeded.
How did that work?
Because VMI is a military institute, you get
out, and do you go directly to-
Yeah, when you graduate.
When I graduated, I had a diploma in one hand
and an order placing me on active duty in
other hand. In 10 days, I'd have to go. I was
going to report to Fort Crockett in Galveston
to get into the system. I was scheduled
immediately to report, I think 10 days later or something
like that, to Fort Knox, Kentucky. I had been
trained in VMI in the horse cavalry. We spent
hours and hours and hours on horses all while I
was at VMI
with an army colonel leading
that class. When we graduated, of course,
horses were just about out of
fashion at that time.
It was tanks.
We automatically became members of the
armed force, I guess you'd say.
My commission was in the U.S. Cavalry, but no
cavalry, so we went to tanks.
We were at Fort Knox learning about tanks when
they had a severe shortage of Air Force
officers and Sigma Corps officers.
So they took my entire class at VMI, electrical
engineering class, and graduated with me.
We all ended up in the Signal Corps, and we
immediately were sent to Fort Monmouth in
New Jersey to go to school training in the
Signal Corps.
Did you go through any type of regular basic
training at all?
Oh yes, in high school I was a major in ROTC.
I started off in ROTC in high school, yes, and
in fact I was one of the trainers in my
senior year when the new men came in that year.
I was one of the people that helped train them,
I mean left face, right face, Et cetera,
how to salute and whatever.
And oh yeah, that was constant and every-you
had drill several times a week and you had
a full dress parade every day of the week
except Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Well, I guess I mean when you were finally in
the Army, do you have to do basic training
or did they waive that because of the fact that
you were a VMI graduate?
Oh yes, I did not have any basic training when
I went into the Army.
We did not do basic training.
In fact, when I finished a course at Fort
Monmouth, my first assignment was to a unit
called 1616A. 1616A, I won't forget that number
because I couldn't find out what it meant.
It was telling me to report to a camp in North
Carolina and I would be part of 1616A. In
In that process, I of course went to North Carolina.
In the training there, it was mostly
technicians, higher level sergeants, and the
officers consisted
of a lot of colonels, majors, captains, all
engineers or some other specialty in the Army.
You couldn't quite put it all together, because
these officers didn't really know anything
about the Army.
They didn't know how to Sloot, they didn't know
how to do left or right face, they'd
never been on a firing range before.
And so I was one of the few officers that had
done all that, so they put me in charge
of training this group of officers,
higher-ranking officers, in the fundamentals of
the Army.
When you get in the Army, yeah, you will have
some sort of basic training.
Since I had had mine, I didn't go through that,
but these officers had not had it, so
that's what I did at that time.
You're pretty young, too. You're, what, twenty?
I was twenty years old.
Twenty years old.
Yeah. I turned twenty-one right after I
finished at Monmouth going to North Carolina, because
my birthday was in September the 3rd. That's
when I became twenty-one.
All right. So you go to North Carolina, you're
among all these officers that don't really
We're staged in North Carolina.
We formed into companies, platoon, living in
wooden barracks, temporary barracks.
Nothing to do, actually, except do the-in fact,
they asked me to teach some of the enlisted
men to hold a class in electrical engineering,
you know, teach them how to be electricians.
So anyway, the month of September closed, then
the month of October, we were there the
number of November, morale was very low, no one
knew what was going on.
We didn't know what we were destined for, but
we assumed we were going to do something
in the Atlantic because we were in North Carolina.
And then on Christmas, the last week in
Christmas, we got orders to board the train,
the train
pulled up into the area, and we boarded a
train, and it started off, instead of going
to Atlantic, it started off going to New
Orleans, but then we were really confused.
So anyway, we crossed the United States in this
troop train to go to San Francisco, and
And then we realized we were going to be in the
Pacific War, not the Atlantic War.
And so we were staged there, I can't remember
the name of the camp, it was strictly a temporary
camp as I remember it, for a few weeks, and we
all got on buses and went to San Francisco
and drew up beside this huge vessel, this ship,
and boarded it.
They later told us it was a Queen Elizabeth.
It would be interesting to me if somehow you
could find out what the Queen Elizabeth was
doing in the first part of January of 1943,
because, anyway, it was a big British liner,
us cruise ship that had been converted into a
troop carrying ship.
So we sailed out of San Francisco under the
Golden Gate Bridge.
They told us we were going to Hawaii, so we
went to Hawaii, and we only spent the night
or two in Hawaii while they replenished, I
guess, the fuel and food.
And then we took off again and went to New Zealand.
We still didn't know what we were going to do,
who we were, where we were going, except
we couldn't tell anybody.
They told us a very, very secret.
So we went to New Zealand and went to
Australia, spent a day or two in each place.
And then when we left Australia, we didn't
know, but we were headed for India, for Bombay, India.
That's when they told us what we were going to
do, that we were going to Iran.
We were going to establish a link between the
United States and Russia in order to have
a supply route.
We had agreed with Russia to give them all this
material, and in giving it to them, I
don't know whether it was land lease or not,
but they were getting a lot of material from us.
The northern route was frozen over during the
wintertime, and they couldn't use it,
so they looked for a southern route.
Well, if you have a southern route to Russia,
you've got to go through the Persian Gulf
and through the country of Iran to get to the
Caspian Sea, and then the material could
be delivered to Russia.
So we would have formed the link, about 700
miles link, between the Caspian Sea and the
Persian Gulf in the country of Iran.
That's why we had so many technicians along.
We weren't a fighting group, we were a
technical group.
I guess it was about a division of men, I don't
know how many thousand of us there were.
I saw somewhere, and I'm going to keep looking
at this because I have some notes here, somewhere
it said about 14,000 men.
That's a figure I remember boarding the ship.
When we boarded the ship, they had hammocks of
three layers, you know, all the floors underwater.
We were told at that time there were 14,000
troops on board.
Pretty crowded.
A lieutenant and I lived together and we had a
cabin, I mean a separate cabin, and the
officers had separate cabins, but all the
enlisted men were living in hammocks.
Wow, it does sound very crowded.
Do you remember anything about that, about this
long trek that you take across the Pacific?
Oh, we, nothing to do.
We spent a lot of time at night.
The ship was zigzagging, the reason it took so
long, you know, you'd go I don't know how
many miles in one direction and then you'd go
zag, you'd go in another, to prevent a
submarine from getting to you if they were
ahead of you, looking at you coming.
They wouldn't exactly know what to do.
Anyway, in zigzagging, we left San Francisco in
the first part of January of 1943, and
we arrived in Iran, in Khorramshah, Iran, which
is a place right on the Gulf.
On April the 1st, because of the date, April
1st, and as we debarked, there was a very
muddy place, the rain, everybody was intense.
They were yelling to us, you know, you'll be
sorry, and that was the first greeting
we got when we got off the ship in Iran.
You'll be sorry?
You'll be sorry, yeah.
We didn't pay much attention to anything at
that time.
We were just glad to know where we were going
and what we were supposed to do.
And so that's what, there's a train that goes
from that area up to Tehran, and we boarded
the train and I forgot how many days it took us.
It's a long ride. It's a single track
I think, I'm not sure, but you go through
hundreds of tunnels. It's a very mountainous
area there to get to Toronto. We had a wild
engineer. The train would go twice as fast
I think it's supposed to, it should go.
Anyway, finally we finally got to Tehran and
started doing what we were supposed to do.
And what was it that you were supposed to do,
you yourself?
I was a communications officer, and I was, my
unit was in charge,
in charge, responsible for encoding and
decoding all messages that came in or left from Iran.
We had a lot of messages having to do with the
material that was being furnished to Russia,
but everything that left the country was in code.
So we had a pretty good-sized radio room, all
the operators knowing the Morse code.
We would get a message.
We would get a sheet of paper with all the
Morse code on it.
We would decode it and put it in final forms
for delivery to whoever it was going to.
And so we were that link in the element of communication.
I read a little bit about the unit, and it said
that when you got there that there were
really no buildings for you.
Is that true?
That's right.
We had to build our own camp.
The engineers, the Army engineers built.
We lived in Tehran while they were building the camp.
And so the first, when we landed in April, we
had offices, temporary offices in some
of the buildings downtown.
Then a few months later, they finished the
construction on the outskirts of Tehran.
I think the last I heard, there was a big
Hilton Hotel or something there now.
We had single-floor, very simple-type rooms,
very small and built in a U-shape.
I'm fairly sure you had a roommate, maybe?
Yeah, I had a roommate. He turned out to be a
very good friend.
I came to know him because when I first got to
North Carolina, I was having dinner, and
all of this was temporary construction there in
North Carolina.
Anyway, we were having dinner, and someone told
me that there was an officer in one of
the rooms above who was ill.
And so I thought, well, I may go take him up
something to eat.
So I did, and I took him up something to eat.
And he was very, very thankful, and his name
was Gilbert Cady, C-A-D-Y, Cady.
He was in Arizona State University in Tempe.
He was one of the administrative officers there.
In fact, I have learned since then that they
built a little memorial to him on the campus,
some sort of creative area, Katie's.
Anyway, so he was a lieutenant and I was a
lieutenant and we became friends and it turned
out he was a, I didn't realize this at the
time, he was a member of the Inspector General Group.
His rank was, he was a lieutenant in the
Inspector General Department and his friendship lasted
throughout my entire career because we ended
up, we got to, I roomed with another guy on
board the ship, another lieutenant from Mississippi.
Then when we got to Iran, my roommate, Katie
and I roomed together and he quickly became
a captain and a major and a colonel.
He was my mentor, I mean, he was very helpful
to me in the service.
And you met him where again?
I met him in North Carolina, and I think the
camp was Camp Butler, close to where Duke
University is.
I think there's still something there of this
name, Butler, Buckner.
It wasn't Bragg, was it?
Fort Bragg?
Oh, no.
No, not Bragg. Butler.
What was it like in Iran?
I mean, when they finally get the buildings
built and you move in, what's it like?
What's the weather like?
Well, the weather was similar to Virginia, actually.
You could have snow in the wintertime, pretty
much just normal weather.
This is in Tehran.
Now you go down to Khorramshahr, where we first
landed, and we had troops occupying
all that area, Basra, Khorramshahr.
The temperature would get well over 100.
talking about a normal temperature, it would be
120, and it would get hotter than that.
They would wet their sheets and try to cool off
by getting under a wet sheet.
Really? It was that hot?
Very hot. Very hot, primitive. It's wild
country down there, a lot of desert country.
And they
had to build a highway. They had camel trails
through all that area. They didn't have
highways. So we had to build a highway.
Yeah, I did read something about that. I guess
to transport all the equipment and supplies
and things that they were moving north?
Yeah, that was it. We had to build a highway to
get the stuff to Russia. It was sent on
a train and some of the aircraft was flown
directly to Russia, particularly when they
attacking Stalingrad, they needed air support
right away so the planes would be intact when
they delivered them.
Ordinarily, they would put the planes together
somewhere down in that part of the country
and deliver it to Russia.
What other equipment did you see that was
headed towards Russia?
Tanks, maybe?
Oh, they did everything. Trucks, a lot of
trucks, thousands, hundreds of thousands, I
think, trucks, a lot of ammunition, clothing.
I think one item used to be, you'd never think
about it, but it's boots. You got to have good
boots to resist the Germans, to fight a war.
So they had food, they had petroleum products,
all of that sort of thing.
Now you mention petroleum. I'm sure there was a
lot of oil in Iran.
Yeah. Well, I don't know what the oil situation
was at that time, but Iran was a very backward country.
Well, when you got into Tehran, even Tehran,
you know, they had no water supply.
The water that you used was water that would
trickle down off the mountain and flow through
the city, the ditches of the city, and that's
where the water came from, and they had no
sewer system or anything like that.
You wonder how people survived, but I guess
your body gets immune to it.
I know I saw a lady one night holding a baby in
the ditch, right over the head, right above
the water, splashing water into the baby's
mouth, and you think, and up in the next area
there might be a horse drinking out of the same
river, or the same gutter, whatever you
want to call it.
Well, yeah, it would be kind of weird to live
in a society where you didn't have running water.
You could turn it on and off, and it was
readily available.
Oh, yeah.
What else stood out to you about Iran as a
country, as the area that you were in?
Well, it was very-they're very intelligent
people there.
I mean, they have businessmen, you know, that
are smart, and they live in nice homes.
them. They have high walls around them. They
were very friendly. They would invite us over
for dinner or something like that, go downtown,
have dinner at their home. Very friendly.
Of course, the Shah was alive. He actually came
out, and I know I was on the parade ground
one time, on the grounds that the Army was
using as a parade ground. The Shah was there
with our commanding general, and they were good friends.
But that wealthy class is not the majority.
As soon as you leave that level, you get down
into a lower level, and then when you finally
get down to the lower level, you were dealing
with very poor people, and a lot of people
begging bakshus, and the life was not so important.
I have walked over the streets, down the
streets of Iran, and stepped over dead bodies that
were in the sidewalk.
And yes, and I don't know, they were finally
moved I guess by somebody.
But you know, things like that just didn't
disturb anybody, it's just part of accepted
life at that time.
And all the women wore the black, I don't know
what you call it, yeah, with everything
money is covered, yeah. And you were very
careful not to take pictures of them.
Q. Would they get offended if you did?
A. Well, they didn't. You weren't supposed to
do that. I don't know. They don't like
And so, of course, most of those folks spoke
that language, what is it, Farsi?
Yes, Sir.
How were they, as far as being friendly, were
they friendly?
Oh, yes, very friendly.
We had a houseboy out in our county.
The officers had two or three of these U-shaped
buildings where we lived.
We all had Iranian boys that built the fire for
us and got the water hot for us and looked
after us.
Everything was very friendly.
You could walk down the streets and feel secure
in Tehran at that time.
We talked a little bit about the Tehran
conference yesterday.
About what?
The Tehran conference.
Yeah, right.
Can you kind of tell me your perspective of
what you heard, at least?
Well, you know, the Tron conference was very
exciting for me because when you're decoding
a message and it's very confidential, it starts
off saying, for the eyes of General so-and-so only.
And it also says the next time you read the
word stop or something like that, you call
the officer in charge and he will finish
decoding this message.
So they'd wake me up in the middle of the
night, you know, Washington would send out
messages at that time, at 5:00, after they'd
had their meetings in Washington, I guess.
them at midnight over there.
So anyway, my sergeant woke me up and told me
to come over to the office.
We had an eyes-only message, and so I went over
and finished decoding the message.
And the message was to the commanding general,
telling him that Roosevelt and Churchill and
Stalin were going to meet there, and anyway,
giving him advance notice of what was about
to take place.
And so I got to get that message.
I was the only one that knew it at that time
because I was the one that decoded the message,
but I immediately got in my Jeep and went down
to the General lived downtown in a villa
of some kind, and so I had him awakened and
gave him that message.
And that was my first introduction to the Tron Conference.
Do you recall what the General's reaction was?
Oh, no.
He just said, thank you, Lieutenant, and I
turned around and left.
I had one other occasion like that, I decoded
the message and it said, our intelligence
indicates that it is likely you're going to be,
I forgot the exact words, but the Germans
are going to overrun your area.
See there was a strong feeling at that time
that the Germans wanted to take over all that
part of the country.
They were stopped by Eisenhower at Cairo.
So I decoded that message and quickly got in my
jeep and went to the General's home
and had him awakened and gave him the message
that Washington thought we were probably going
to be overrun by the Germans and he said, well,
you know, just a minute, let me talk
to my chief of staff, so he talked to his chief
of staff, and he came back and said,
there's no answer, no reply, Lieutenant.
So it kind of shocked me, because I thought he
was going to react in some way other than
that, but the only thing I could say was, yes,
Sir, and turn around and leave.
But then you begin to wonder, well, what is
going on?
But you couldn't tell anybody, you know, that
was all very, very secret information.
Now the camp that you were in was just outside
of Tehran, is that correct? Yeah.
What was the name of the camp? Pardon?
Did the camp have a name?
I think it was Camp Amirabad, Amirabad, yeah, I
think that's, I think it was Amirabad. Amirabad?
Amirabad, yeah. That must be an Iranian word.
Amirabad. I think that's it. Amirabad?
And I never had any, we never had to use it
because we couldn't get, our families didn't
know where we were.
They couldn't write us, you know, use the APO number.
The only way we got mail, and then all the mail
out, as officer, I had to censor all
the mail for my men and black out anything they
mentioned that might indicate where we were.
GILLIS So was there a lot of mail? Was there a
lot of blocking out of it to do?
GILLIS Well, it would take a while to censor
all the mail, yeah.
GILLIS Do you actually recall when Roosevelt
and Churchill and Stalin show up, or do you,
I mean, you're in the area, so something must
have changed as far as security.
We just know that there is a meeting going on downtown.
I think they met at the, what, the Russian
embassy, probably.
Didn't have anything to do with our camp,
except I did notice General Marshall was in
the group.
One day I was walking towards the dining room,
and the mess hall was, officer's mess hall
was up sort of on a mountain, I mean, a little
hill, and I remember looking up that Hill
and there was General Marshall. I remember he
had on his overcoat and he was looking
out over the camp. At that time, I could
imagine-see, General Marshall went to VMI, too. Although
I didn't know General Marshall, I had a close
feeling for him because I knew he went
the VMI.
But anyway, I could see him looking, saying,
because you know, they created this thing
out of nothing.
I mean, the Army did, and somewhere somebody
had to plan all that stuff.
And I can see him looking on it and say, well,
we were successful in this thing.
There it is, I'm looking at it.
Anyway, he might not have had those thoughts at
all, but that's what I thought when I looked
at him.
Because he was there at the top of this hill
coming down from the camp.
That's the only time, I mean the rest of them,
as far as I know, didn't come to the camp.
But he did, I saw him.
Being in such an out-of-the-way place, did you
ever get any type of USO show or any kind
Yes, they would every now and then have some of
the guys played music, played instruments,
and they would get together and we would have a dance.
And I had the unfortunate experience of we had
an interpreter, a young girl, a Russian
girl who knew five languages.
She knew French, German, Arabic, whatever, and
she was our interpreter.
I mean not our interpreter but in the other
part of that camp, you know probably even
where the general was, they needed interpreters
and so she was one of them.
Well I don't know how, somewhere I was
introduced to her, I can't even remember where.
Anyway she became a friend of ours, a group of
officers, and I was unmarried at the time
and most of the other guys were married, and I
ended up sort of being, if we were going
to give a dance they'd say, well go get, her
name was Tanya, go get Tanya, we need somebody
to dance with.
So I'd have a date with, in effect have a date
with Tanya, and we'd go to the dance.
And somehow people were assuming there was some
sort of relationship with me and Tanya,
but there was not.
But anyway, one day I was called into the
colonel's office and he said, Lieutenant,
you're going to have to break off.
The Russian girl you're seeing, since I had
access to all the secrets, you know, you can't
continue that relationship.
He said, if you don't do it, he said, I'm going
to ship you out of here.
So I said, yes Sir.
So I had the unfortunate experience of going to
her one day and said, look, we can't meet anymore.
This is it.
I'm not going to take in any more dancers.
It was not a pleasant experience because she
couldn't understand why also, because women
in that situation, they're looking for some way
to get to the United States.
And it's a very good way to get to the United
States by forming a relationship with one
of the soldiers.
So she realized that that was not going to happen.
Anyway, so we had to break off our relationship.
It was one of the surprises that got me, the
fact that innocently a friend of this woman
who worked for the camp, and she wasn't just
somebody with no connection with the
Army, but the fact that she was Russian settled
the issue right there. Right.
I mean, I guess they might have thought she was
a spy or something. Yeah.
So anyway, I didn't see her anymore.
She was still around, but I didn't see her.
She started dating another, an Air Corps
officer, and the last I heard, he was being transferred
back to the country they got as far as Cairo,
and that's the last I heard of him.
Were there Russians on the space also?
Were there what?
Were there Russians on the space, I mean, other
than the interpreter? No.
It was solely American?
Oh, yeah.
This was strictly American. Yeah.
Were there ever any instances where you had to
deal with the Russians other than the interpreter?
Well, in my part of the operation, I didn't
have to do that.
I'm sure there were, but I didn't have anything
to do with it.
The camp, by the way, was circled with a fence
and about 10-15 feet there were mines hidden.
Those people were so desperate they would steal anything.
Occasionally you would hear one of them go off,
one of the mines would blow, and you
would know that somebody had tried to walk
across that area, and he didn't quite make it.
Trying to get into the camp to steal something?
Yeah, well, trying to get into the camp, yeah.
Did you only deal with Americans the entire
time there, or did you ever deal with the British?
I had, no, I didn't deal with the British until
I got to Cairo, but while I was in Tehran,
So I had no dealings with the British, but they
were there, they were all in that part
of the country.
Do you recall who your commanding officer was?
Yeah, our colonel was named Thomas, colonel, I
can't think of his first name, Thomas.
I think it was from Georgia, and he must have
had some experience with the telephone company.
He was, I can't remember when I first knew him,
I guess he was, I don't know whether
he was a lieutenant colonel or a full colonel,
but he finally ended up making general.
He was a brigadier general.
Oh, really? Uh-huh.
What kind of officer was he?
He was a, you know, he was a civilian,
essentially, but he was a good officer, I guess
you could say.
It's kind of hard to, I didn't have that much
to do with him, actually.
He was interested in what was going on in the
area, in the field, and all the information
that was available on the subject of what's
going on in our unit there, as far as the
camp is concerned, was in those messages that
we had.
So he would come back in the morning he would
show up in my office.
I had an office and then attached to that
office was the area where all the coding and
decoding was done.
And he would come to the front office and sit
at my desk and leaf through the messages
that had been sent or received during the day.
He wanted to keep up with what was going on, I
don't blame him.
That was my-he was not a-you know, occasionally
we would have an informal gathering of some
kind, but he was not somebody that you got very
close to.
I guess he felt it his duty to remain a part, I
think, because of his position, you know.
Q. A lot of responsibility. I can see why he
wanted to keep up with what was going on
through those messages. I'm sure he had a lot
more to do.
A. Yeah.
Q. Did you have, like, an immediate supervisor
over you?
A. There was another officer that was there
when I went there named, well, his name was
Crash Davis. He was from
Q. Crash Davis?
A. Crash Davis.
Q. Why the name?
Well, I don't know what the crash-I've
forgotten his first name.
He was from, I think, Massachusetts.
So he and I worked together, I guess you'd say,
and I learned the ropes from him because
he had gotten there first.
By then he may have been a first lieutenant, I
can't remember.
But he and I, we had 24-hour shifts, so one of
us would work during the day and the other
would be there at night.
We started off, one of us was always there on
duty, but that was the only supervision
I had.
The colonel didn't have anything to do with
supervising what I did, and no one else did.
No one else had anything to do with the codes.
The codes were very confidential.
We have several different codes.
Every month you had to destroy and you got a
new set of codes.
Some of it was operating electrical machines
that you could code and decode.
And then eventually I got another officer, oh,
after a year or two, I guess, another
officer to come in to be my assistant.
And by then I had finally made captain and then
I had a lieutenant doing what I started
off doing.
And then I was officially made cryptographic
security officer.
was a title that I got after I had been there a while.
Q. You must have enlisted men working for you,
didn't you?
A. Oh, yeah. A whole bunch of them, uh-huh.
Q. About how many soldiers did you have working
for you?
A. Well, see, we worked in three different
shifts. The, what, the graveyard, I can't
Can't even remember now what we called them,
but anyway, day and night, later on at night,
there were probably, all of these folks were sergeants.
There probably would be eight or ten of us on a shift.
And so I had probably 25 or 30 enlisted men
that I was responsible for technically.
When they left my office and went back to where
they lived in the barracks, their barracks,
they were subject to other officers.
I mean, they would be in a unit.
They were in some Signal Corps company that had
some sort of a framework of discipline.
When they came with me, my work with them was
always technical.
wasn't making up the bad, doing whatever is K.P.
duty or whatever, you know.
That's kind of different. I mean usually it's
the, you have that direct relationship, but
they would go, they got to their barracks, they
had their, they reported to other officers
when they weren't on duty?
That's right, yes. I would get to know them
because I would be the one that would censor
their mail, and even though we never talked
about it, I would learn more about them and
use that information to help me.
A lot of the people there wanted to go, they
wanted to fight.
They wanted to get into the war.
It was hard to convince them that what they
were doing was essential to the war effort.
had to keep the Germans occupied and fight them
and win before we could have D-Day.
And that's what they talked about at the Tehran
Conference, as I understand it, how they were
going to work out those fronts at the same time.
So we didn't want to have D-Day without the
Germans being occupied with the Russians on
the other end.
Right, so it was better to dilute their forces
in Western Europe.
Yeah, so we wanted Russia to get the advantage
of the Germans as quickly as possible so they
could be the aggressive force on the East if we
were going to be the aggressive force
on the West.
Do any of these soldiers that worked for you,
do any one of them stand out in particular?
Oh yeah, they were my sergeant. We had two
sergeants. One of them was named Blessington.
Another one I remember worked for the company
that made caps that you would put on milk
bottles at that time.
You probably don't even remember the time when
milk came in bottles and it had a cardboard
cap on it. Cardboard?
No, I don't remember that.
Anyway, he worked for a company, but they were,
you know, it was very difficult.
You had to be very careful when you got a message.
You didn't want to lose it in the process, you
know, and the message would come here
It was immediately numbered and listed, and
then it went back into the code and decoding area.
They would have to find out what code it was
in, and they would decode it.
Then it would come back, and it would have to
be identified with the message that had come in
to make sure you didn't lose it somewhere.
Otherwise, we could have gotten messages coming
in that never did get out, and we wouldn't
have known it.
How many messages, just at best, did you get in
a day?
Oh, there were hundreds.
Well, you can imagine, I got eight to ten guys
back there coding, and of course a lot
of it is in or out, but anyway, it's a lot
of-we also, you relay traffic, too.
we would send stuff to Russia, whoever, I
don't, I forgot now where, seemed like it
wasn't just Moscow, it was some other place.
When you get a message that had to
be relayed somewhere, you would have to
paraphrase it. You would decode it and
see what it says and then paraphrase it and
send it on its way, which would make
it more difficult for anybody trying to break
the code.
Well, why were they relayed through your station?
Why couldn't you just send it directly to the
end point?
We would send a lot of stuff to Ancara and Cairo,
some other places where we had other facilities,
and they would relay it on to Washington.
See, at that time, we didn't have direct
communication with Washington.
In fact, what we tried to do at one time was
build what they call a rhombic antenna.
And a rhombic antenna was a long sort of
diagonal, I mean, not circular, but a hexagon
or whatever
it was, I don't know, with wires that would be
like an envelope.
And it could pick up signals that were sent
from Washington, and a lot of it had to do
with, I don't know anything about the radio
aspect of it, but I guess the signals would
bounce off the clouds or whatever, and they
would finally get to us directly from Washington.
But that never did seem to work good.
So we would still get messages.
They would come by way of Cairo or some other
place like that.
And some of those operators were very, very good.
We had a warrant officer who, you know, the
dit-dot-dit machines, it's something you don't
go up and down, you go to the right or the left.
And they got so they could send messages so
fast that the person receiving it was trying
to type it faster than he could type.
And they used to play games with each other.
Some operator, you know, particularly the Army,
this is regular Army people.
They would try to outdo each other.
The guy in Cairo would try to send a message so
fast that the man in Tehran couldn't get
and vice versa. It was friendly competition.
What else stands out about your time in Tehran?
Well, I found it very interesting.
I can see. Totally different world.
Yeah, it is. But, you know, they have
nightclubs there.
Well, they have places to eat.
You have to be careful of the food.
When you start eating downtown, locally,
locally, you probably are going to get
Diarrhea, most likely, if you're not careful.
But everything is very primitive.
But they had music.
They would have orchestras playing American stuff.
But you'd walk down the street and you'd pass
shops with meat, and the meat that was being
soul would be, you know, the whole body of
whatever the animal was with all the flies
and everything around it.
It was keeping things sanitary was not really
important to them.
I guess you must have eaten at the mess hall
quite a bit. Yeah.
Oh yeah.
You were very careful.
There were a few restaurants you could go to.
I can't remember anything about them.
I just remember that when I was still going
with that Tanya, that girl, we would have
a date sometimes and go eat somewhere.
I was trying to learn something about what goes
on in downtown Tehran also.
You would have, they would play dance music.
You'd think, gee I'm back in the United States.
I'm at a ballroom here.
But most of it is not that we ever got to see,
because we didn't know.
I don't know, like schools and things like
that, I don't even know what they had or whether
they had them.
I suppose they did, but no telling how they
were like.
You'd hear awful stories about the condition of
the prisoners, the prisons.
We had to be careful at driving trucks.
Some people would jump in front of the truck
just to be injured so they could go to our
hospital so that the Americans would take care
of them. Really?
Yeah, they would get so desperate like that.
Do you figure they were maybe starving and
trying to find a way to get food or?
Yeah, you know, they don't have any government
programs to take care of anybody.
You do it by begging.
It's a terrible way to live, and how long were
you in Tehran?
Well, I went there and I got there on April
1st, and let's see, I made one trip back to
go to the training meeting they were having in
the Pentagon. I think it was for a six-week
period. And then I made another trip, I'm
having a hard time remembering, I made another
trip back when I was going to become, when I
had been promoted, the cryptographic security
Anyway, I made two trips back, and I finally,
just before VE Day, just before the war ended
in Europe, it was before that, April, May, they
started thinking in terms of, they were
really preparing for the liquidation of
material over in Europe after the war ended.
It was a foreign liquidation commission, and it
was attached to, I think, the State Department.
Anyway, they were putting together a group that
would spend another year or so in Cairo
disposing of Army property.
So on one of my trips back, my friend Katie
told me that they had selected him to be a
member of this group.
They were trying to find a group of folks that
were willing to stay in Cairo and do
this, and that he had been selected to be a
member of that group, and our commanding
general was going to be in charge of the group
in Cairo, and this would all happen after
the war in Europe.
So he asked me if I wanted to be a member of
that group, and I said, you know, the war
was still going on in the Pacific and in
Europe, and I would think, well, yeah, when the war
is over in Europe, what's going to happen to
the Pacific? So I said, yeah, I'd be happy
to be a member of that group. So he said, well,
it will require another year. You got
to volunteer for a year. And I said, okay, I've
been over here three years now, a little
over three years. One more year won't make much
difference. He said, well, okay, but
we have to go back to Washington and get this
thing formed,
get the unit formed, the group that's gonna do it.
So, I'm trying to remember the exact dates,
and I could look at my book of orders
and probably figure it out,
but I ended up back in Washington,
and this group was being formed,
and we were getting shots and all that stuff.
Since I had been overseas all this time,
they put me in charge of this group
to get them back into Cairo.
So we went back to Cairo when we were landing.
So I'm trying to take, when I left Iran,
and it was just before,
between the ending of the war in Europe
and the ending of the war in the Pacific,
that's when I left.
Left Iran?
Left Iran and went to Cairo.
ended up in Cairo, yeah.
You only headed up the group in order to get it organized?
Yeah, just to get it, just to go through the process
of boarding the plane and making sure we had,
you know, box lunches or whatever, just to,
that we were gonna spend the night in New York.
We had to go to New York and board the plane
at the airport and out of New York.
When you are in Cairo, what does your job turn
to then?
Yeah, well, that was a completely different deal.
We were officed in one of the big buildings,
nice, I guess at one time, homes in downtown Cairo.
My job was, I was going to be the
administrative officer for the group.
And the rest of the group was trying to sell
Army equipment to whoever would buy it.
There were five of us that lived together.
The government had rented a big apartment, a
three-story apartment building, a house
on the Nile River, just out of downtown Cairo,
and that's where we were going to live.
And they furnished us with a car and a
chauffeur, and we were living under very good conditions.
It was quite a change from what was going on in Iran.
And so we would, every morning, go to the
office and do whatever we had to do and come
back at night and end up playing.
I think we played gin rummy forever, and there
wasn't anything else to do in Cairo, except
every now and then we would go out, and they
did have nightclubs in Cairo, so we'd go to
a nightclub.
Anyway, it was quite a nice life, but we did
sell Army property.
You know, you had thousands of typewriters, and
you had whole hospitals you had to get
rid of.
And who would you sell it to?
Trucks, you know, all that stuff.
You had some wealthy folks over there, Egyptians.
They would invite us.
One of them, I know, invited us out to his
country home.
He served us whiskey that had been in the
bottle since 1800 and something, you know.
So they would buy stuff, you know, ¢10,
probably a penny on the dollar, and we'd just
try to get rid of it, and they wouldn't have to
give us very much to do that.
But I wasn't one of the salesmen, the other
group of officers did that.
What other things would be sold, trucks or
jeeps, or were any, like, rifles included?
Any kind of ammunition or guns be included?
Any kind of...
What other things would be, what other things
were sold, were there any, like, rifles that
were sold on?
Anything like that?
You know, I don't know specifically.
I just knew that stuff like trucks were big, so
I don't know whether we were selling rifles.
I think the Army, I'm not sure they would, I
don't know.
I can't voice an opinion on that one.
We may have done it, but I have no idea.
I've heard that at the end of the war, a lot of
stuff got left behind, like peachy
boats in the Pacific would be burned and sunk,
which I think is kind of weird.
And I did hear just a little bit about some of
the selling that went on.
I'm sure it did, because this stuff was not
located in Cairo, it was located in Europe.
The opportunity to buy that stuff for a very
cheap price and know that you have a market
for it, and know what the market is, I mean if
you live there you can figure all that
out was the ability to make a lot of money, and
those guys are pretty good about that.
They know how to do that.
Q. So how long were you in Cairo?
A. Well, see, I got to Cairo in - whenever we
agreed, I forgot what the day was.
Q. I think you said it was between the end of
the war in Europe and the end of the war
in Japan.
I was landing in the Cairo airfield when the
pilot came back and said the war in Japan
was over.
And I was thinking, oh, Golly, I'm going to be
over here another year.
At least there wasn't any danger of being shot at.
Oh no, this was before I knew what kind of deal
it was going to be.
We hadn't had any experience yet.
Well, I was there and then I was, I guess I was
there a year because it was back in
July of August, in August when I was, when I
left active duty.
And I came back from there to Washington and
went on inactive duty.
Q. I'm just curious, while you were in Cairo,
did you go visit the Great Pyramids?
A. Did what?
Q. Did you go to visit the Great Pyramids? Did
you have time for that?
A. Oh, in Cairo, yes, we did. We lived right on
the Nile in the evening before dark, before
we started playing gin rummy, we could sit out
on the back, we had a balcony, sit out
and drink beer and watch the boats on the Nile
go back and forth.
A lot of, that's the means of transporting a
lot of stuff back and forth, you know.
Then one week, then we had contact with the
British there in Cairo.
I used to go to their barracks and drink beer
with them.
What were they like?
They were interesting.
I had a hard time understanding sometimes what
they would say, but...
A lot of people say that.
Also, they have a country club.
The British had a country club there.
I'll think of the name if I thought long enough.
But it was a very nice club, and they would let
us play golf there.
Now, I'm a golfer, and so was the Fella that I
was rooming with in the apartment building.
So we would play golf and go to their club.
The British were going to fly down to Luxor one
weekend and asked me if I wanted to go
with them.
And so I did, and so I got to spend the weekend
in Luxor, and we toured-there were no tourists
at that time.
We were the tourists, so we had run to the mill.
So we had a good tour of Luxor and they showed
us all the remains and they went to the tomb
of King Tut and one night they had what they
called the Arizona Club.
It was a nightclub in Cairo, the Arizona Club.
And at the next table was the king, I can't
remember his name, not Farouk, but anyway,
whatever it was, he was there at the table with
some gals, with other women, and at this
club everything they do is belly dancing.
So you go to a nightclub you get a lot of belly dancing.
I remember we did that at that club.
And I had an unusual experience one time of
the, I think it burned since then, anyway
Anyway they had a hotel that was the prominent
hotel in the city at that time.
They gave a party with all the attachés and
council and embassy people with the British
and with the Middle Eastern natives, some of
the tribe leaders in that part of the world.
I had a, there was a British girl who was
instigated in getting all this stuff together.
At that party I was, we ended up being sort of dates.
She said, you know the, somebody who's one of
the tribe members wanted us to come to
his room.
He wanted to talk to us, he wanted to talk to
an American.
And so we went up to the room, they had guards
at the door, you know, big tough looking guys.
Anyway we ended up in this hotel room with this guy.
He was a tribe leader and they were telling us,
you know, you be careful.
All he has to do is give the word and you'll be
eliminated, you know.
And so, well he wanted to go out.
He had a date with one of the British actors,
the Cairo actresses who was very popular.
You go through Cairo and on the big billboards
you'd see her picture.
Well that's the gal he had a date with.
So no, this was his tribe leader.
It's the tribe leaders.
And I'd forgotten what part of the country he
owned, but he had his own area.
He was the boss someplace.
So sure enough, we had this limousine and we
went out and got in the limousine and him
and the actress and me and this British girl.
That's when I went to the Arizona Club, I was
telling you.
He wanted to go to the Arizona Club, so that's
where we ended up.
But that was an unusual experience.
He liked to talk to Americans, and he could
speak our language.
Anyway, you know, when you get involved in
international stuff like that, you run into
some interesting experiences.
I've forgotten more than I can, well, more than
I can remember.
From there, you head back to the States, you
said, you go to Washington?
Went back to Washington and was, left duty in
Washington and decided I wanted to study
accounting and I had, when I was at Fort
Monmouth, I had, there was a young lady that I used
to date and we would go into New York City,
we'd go to Hoboken and catch the ferry over
to New York City and we would have a date in
New York City and come on back and she
had her home was in New Jersey and she was
going to school in Hoboken, a business school,
and she said, well if you're going to be an
accountant, why don't you get an MBA degree
from Columbia.
And I said, well, you know, okay.
So I wrote, you had to write a thesis or
something to get admitted to Columbia, and I
did that,
and I got admitted to Columbia.
And I thought, well, I want to go back to
Texas, to my home, before I do anything like this.
So I came back to Galveston, and my parents
said, you know, you've had a tough time overseas.
Let's take a vacation in Colorado.
And so we went to Colorado and spent a week or two.
they brainwashed me into telling me that I was
making stupid decisions because I'd been
overseas too long, and why didn't I go to the
University of Texas?
Why would I go to Columbia?
So I finally realized, well, that's probably
the thing to do.
I'm going to be a Texan, I'm going to live in
Texas, why go to Columbia?
So I backed out on the Columbia deal and
instead came to Austin.
My father and I drove up to Austin, and I met
with the dean, and he said, yeah, he said,
get your MBA and take the exam and be a CPA.
So that's what I did.
I entered graduate school, MBA program.
It took two and a half years, and when I was
graduating, when I was in the professor's
office one day. He said, what are you going to
do when you get out? I said, I don't know yet.
He said, well, you know what you ought to do is
a firm interviewing on campus called Arthur
Anderson and Company. Why don't you talk to
them? So I did. I talked to Arthur Anderson.
They offered
me a job, and I took it. I wanted to live in
Houston, and they said, fine, you can be part
of our Houston office. So that's how I started
with Arthur Anderson. And I don't know if you've
familiar with Arthur Anderson? It turned out to
be the largest public accounting firm there
is in the world. And so I grew up with them.
And at that time, then I began to get involved
in our recruiting process in addition to my
other duties. And since I had come to Texas,
they put me in charge of recruiting at Texas.
And so I used to spend a lot of time in Texas
at Texas, working with the professors and
whatever, trying to hire good people.
Very competitive.
All the big firms are trying to hire the same people.
Did you retire with Arthur Anderson?
So yeah, I was with them 11 years when I made
Pardner, and then I was with them an additional
20 years after that.
And I finally retired in 1979.
There was a client of ours, the president was
on the board of an SMU organization called
the Center for International Business.
They were looking for somebody to head up the
Houston office, and they asked me when
I retired if I would do that.
So I didn't have anything else to do, and I
said sure.
So for five years, I was in charge of the
office of the Center for International Business,
which was a very interesting non-profit group
of business people who met to discuss strategic
problems around the world in doing business.
Then when I quit them, I ended up being
treasurer of our church for the next 30 years.
So I was a full-time treasurer, installing the
new computer system and whatever.
So that was very interesting, yeah.
So I've had an interesting life, really.
Just a few more questions.
Did you use the GI Bill to get your Master's, I
mean, sorry, your MBA?
Well what finally happened, when I got my job
with Arthur Anderson, I hadn't finished
my thesis, and they said, well, you can finish
that later.
So the professor said, yeah, you got another
five years to work on that.
So when I started with Arthur Anderson, I
didn't have time to work on anything.
I traveled.
I was in charge of a swath across Texas from
Abilene to Shreveport, including Dallas, and
I would spend a lot of time in all those areas
and I just put the thesis aside.
When I started doing work for, so I didn't get
the MBA degree.
The MBA degree, I was under the auspices of the
university, not the business school.
The business school did not have the MBA degree
at that time.
So when I met with the dean of the business
school, and he sold me on the MBA degree,
he was selling me on a University of Texas
course, you might say, not a business course.
Anyway, when I got to know the dean of the
business school, the name is a very fine guy
I'll tell you his name in a minute.
He got interested in me and said, you know, he
said, I've been looking up your record
here in the university, and Kosmetsky was his
name, Kosmetsky, Dean Kosmetsky, I've
I've been looking up your record here, and you
had a good record, and he said, you know,
we don't require a thesis anymore in the
business school to get an MBA degree, and he said,
so I wanted to give you the MBA degree, and he
said, but you registered under the university,
And it's up to another dean to do that, and he
said he will not do it.
I've talked to him about it.
He said, no, he didn't finish his thesis, so he
can't get the MBA degree.
He said, but as far as we're concerned, you got
the MBA degree, but no degree.
But he said, you know, I wanted to do this anyway.
I had spent a lot of time with the guy.
He said, I want you to receive this plaque, the
award, as an outstanding alumnus.
He said, so you're being called an alumnus, and
that's how they're going to know.
You ought to have a degree, and I'm sorry I
can't give you the degree.
So I've got a plaque upstairs I'll show you
that says I'm an outstanding alumnus of the
business school.
But no, I really regret that I never did finish
that thesis, because I do like to write and
it would have been easy.
First, the professor asked me to help him write
a chapter on depreciation.
He was writing a book himself on accounting,
and the professor that told me about Arthur
Anderson, said, you know, why don't you write
this chapter for me on depreciation?
So I said, okay.
So I said, okay, and I never did it.
But I did start writing it on another subject
that I was doing in the firm.
I became the authority on setting rates for oil
companies in selling gas.
It became, as a Supreme Court decision, decided
that the government could regulate the price
of gas that was natural gas, not gasoline, but
natural gas, that was sold by oil companies.
But then the question was, well, what price can
they sell it at?
And so one of the first ideas was to sell it a
little above cost.
Well, then what is cost?
You've got a well producing oil and gas at the
same time.
How much is it costing to produce the gas and
how much to the oil?
Well you know, the answer is going to be a
calculated answer of some kind.
Well anyway, I got into that thing and it
became very, I mean every oil company had
to do something.
They had to, if they wanted to, they had to set rates.
So I did a lot of rate-making for the firm in
the area of setting rates for the sale
of gas.
Do you remember where you were when you heard
it, or do you remember hearing about the atomic bomb?
No, I didn't hear about it until it went off, no.
Q. And I didn't ask you when we started, but
I'm assuming you have a middle name, right?
A. It's Wilbur, W-I-L-B-U-R, Robert Wilbur
Goodman, Jr. That's my father's name.
Q. Okay. Well, you pretty much answered all my
questions today.
Well, I'm not sure I contributed very much, but
it was an interesting time.
And just so we get it on here, it's the Persian
Gulf Command that you're with.
I've never interviewed anybody from the Persian
Gulf Command, so it's a good addition.
Originally it was called Persian Gulf Service
Command, and they cut out the service.
It ended up being the, and we had our own
shoulder patch with a sword.
I've seen it, it's like a little red sword. Yeah.
I saw it when I was reading about it. Yeah.