Jane Templeton Interview, History 150 Spring 2017, Conducted by Ian Templeton, March 23, 2017.
Interview Transcription
- Jane Templeton Interview, History 150 Spring 2017, Conducted by Ian Templeton, March 23, 2017.
- This interview was conducted over the phone in my dorm room and was recorded using GarageBand on my laptop. To prepare, I removed everything from my desk, turned off anything that could make noise, and locked the door to make sure there were no interruptions. The editing process was minimal, as I only removed parts where we got off topic or she misunderstood the question.
- Born in 1934 in Washington, IN, Jane Templeton was the daughter of Jim and Ester Brown. She had an older sister, Lydia, who was born in 1931, and a younger brother, Nick, who was born seven years after Jane. Jane’s family had lived Washington, IN for almost three entire generations before her. She grew up in a family that was very laid back and open to new things.
- This interview was conducted on the topic of life during World War II and the Cold War. Until 1945 the United States had the responsibility of helping the European Allied forces during World War II to prevent Nazi Germany’s invasion of other countries. During this time, American civilians were to ration as many resources – gasoline, metals, food, and even rubber – as they could. A few years after the resolution of World War II came the Cold War, a standoff between the United States and Soviet Russia. The United States was doing everything it could to combat the spread of Communism throughout Europe and Asia. These efforts included attempts to make America’s culture more appealing to European citizens, identifying Communist spies located in the United States, and keeping citizens calm despite the threat of a nuclear war.
References:
Barnhisel, Greg. “Perspectives USA and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 14. 4, Nov. 2007, pp. 729-754.
Frohardt-Lane, Sarah. “Promoting a Culture of Driving: Rationing, Car Sharing, and Propaganda in World War II.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 46. 2, Aug. 2012, pp. 337-355.
(Skip first 10 seconds – Intro)
IT: Do you remember how old you were when World War II first began?
Mrs. Templeton: Uh, yes, I had turned 7 years old the day before.
IT: I think last time you were talking about dancing on the couch when you first heard about it, can you talk about that?
Mrs. Templeton: You want me to talk about it again?
IT: Yeah.
Mrs. Templeton: Okay, for my birthday the day before I took [tap] dancing lessons, so I had gotten a pair of tap dancing shoes. [They were] black patent leather and they didn’t have shoestrings, they tied with a ribbon and they were really cool. [They had] silver taps on the toes and on the heels. I was jumping up and down on the sofa and my mother was about ready to kill me, and, all of the sudden on the radio, the announcer breaks in and says the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. Life kind of changed in a second there because, you know, then they declared war. I think the President, Franklin Roosevelt, declared war the next day maybe. So, my cousin was there. She was maybe 19 and she was dating this boy who had joined the service and was stationed out in California. He called her and said that he was going to be shipped overseas and he wanted her to come out right away so they could get married before he went overseas because people, you know, it was going to be a big deal, people didn’t know if they were going to be killed or if they’d ever get home. So she asked my mother, “Well, do you think I ought to go or…” and mother said, “Get on the train and go!” So she went on the train out to California and married him. He was in the service for four years but survived the war, and they lived to be in their nineties (…).
IT: So how did you first feel about the war?
Mrs. Templeton: About the war?
IT: Yeah.
Mrs. Templeton: Well, even though I was young, because my parents were so upset, I kind of was scared a little bit. I probably didn’t really comprehend exactly what the severity of it was and what the future was going to hold, but I knew that it was bad just from the way my parents talked about it. So you had that little premonition that maybe things weren’t going to be very good for a while, even though you were young at the time.
IT: So, since your parents were worried about it, did they try and do anything to keep your minds off the issue?
Mrs. Templeton: Well, not really. I mean it was just a way of life after that because so many of the young men were going off to war and had to leave their jobs and their families. Food and gasoline became scarce because they had to ship it overseas. They needed the gasoline for the tanks and the equipment they had overseas, and so everyone was rationed. Once a month we got stamps that worked for that month and that’s what you had to live on and drive your car. It was sort of dependent on the size of your family, what your job was, and how much you had to use your car for your job. If you ran out of stamps before the end of the month then you couldn’t get gasoline for the car. There were things like meat and butter and things like that that just were not available because so much of it was going overseas to help feed the troops.
IT: Besides rationing, did you do anything else to help the war effort?
Mrs. Templeton: Well, all the children in my neighborhood started a victory garden. That was one thing they said you could do to help the war effort. Everyone would have a garden and plant their own vegetables and things like that, so a group of us children started a victory garden in someone’s back yard. We planted carrots, onions, tomatoes, and things like that and we’d hoe it and get out there and weed it because we considered it kind of fun. We produced some vegetables and things which we divided up in the neighborhood for people to eat. Sometimes it would only be one tomato per family because it wasn’t that big of a garden, but we thought we were helping with the effort and I guess in a way we were.
IT: Well everything helps. Do you remember what your teachers said about the war?
Mrs. Templeton: Well we were taught that Germany and Japan were trying to overcome us and that they wanted to rule us and were the bad guys which was true. There weren’t any if or ands about it, I mean it was a dire time in history. They did such terrible things to prisoners, it was just awful, the Germans and the Japanese. You know, the Germans had concentration camps, I’m sure you heard about that, and they killed 6 million Jews in those concentration camps just because Germany wanted a “pure” society. They wanted an Aryan society with everyone that was white-skinned and, you know, they had standards. If you weren’t [up to their standards] they put you in a concentration camp and just gassed you. They had these big ovens and they would cremate you because it was the only way they found that they could get rid of the bodies because they were killing so many people so fast that they ran out of places to dispose of them. Of course we didn’t have television or anything, but when we would go to the movies they would have newsreels, which even before the war they had those, and it would be world and national news on them. When the war started a lot of the newsreels were pertaining to war and showed planes bombing things and soldiers fighting. That was about the only pictures we had of the war. They did have war photographers and would put the pictures in your paper, but those were the only two ways you could see anything about the war.
IT: Did you remember the Japanese being sent to internment camps?
Mrs. Templeton: In our country?
IT: Yeah, in the United States.
Mrs. Templeton: Not really, and you know a lot of that actually happened on the west coast because that was where the larger population of Japanese were because, of course, Japan is out in the Western Pacific so the Japanese often migrated to California and Oregon and Washington state. I don’t really remember that, but, even after the war, people thought it was okay that they did that because they didn’t know if they were spies or if they were going to turn on Americans, and they were nice internment camps, it’s not like they were put in huts and slept on wooden cots or something. They just wanted to keep track of all those people and didn’t want them wandering all over the country.
IT: So, besides relieved, how did you feel about the bombings of Japan?
Mrs. Templeton: I thought it was fine because if we didn’t get over there and bomb them they would come over here and bomb us. That’s what war is about and people were very patriotic back in those days. You didn’t have groups of people protesting about rights of some sort or bombing people, you just knew that that was the way war was and the Japanese were so fanatic that they would never quit. That’s why they had to finally use the atom bomb because they would not surrender. And so President Truman just finally decided that we just developed the atom bomb and the only way they were going to quit was if we dropped it on them, and it was a horrible, horrible thing, but that was the only way to get them to stop fighting. They were crazy; their pilots on their plans were kamikaze pilots and were told, “Don’t bail out of the plane. When you get shot and you know you’re going down aim for a ship and ram the plane into the ship.” They were so crazy and fanatical.
IT: Can you describe what your life was like after the war ended? Besides the rationing, what changed?
Mrs. Templeton: Well, of course the rationing went away but things were still hard to get because it took several years to build up the economy. After the war times were great because the soldiers were all coming home and the rationing gradually slowed and industry became important because they needed people for jobs and there weren’t as many people who were unemployed. It was a great time to grow up in and it was that way up until I graduated high school in 1952.
IT: That’s good because I remember you had talked about the [Great] Depression before the war. How did you feel about the start of the Cold War being so soon after the end of World War II?
Mrs. Templeton: With Russia? Well, you had to hope, and I did that, that…no one wanted to have a nuclear war because the atom bomb had been invented by then and we used it in Japan. No one wanted to start a war if they thought they were going to use atomic weapons because it would have just destroyed the whole country. So, you had to assume and hope that both sides – Russia and the United States – would use their heads and diplomacy and keep level-headed through all these ups and downs. Even today we’re doing that with Iran and North Korea. North Korea has weapons now that can almost go all the way to Japan. That dictator is just crazy; you don’t know what he’s going to do. So you have to hope that diplomacy between the two sides will take care of all those problems because a nuclear war would just end the earth.
IT: So you had enough faith in the government that you weren’t too nervous about anything escalating then?
Mrs. Templeton: No, I really wasn’t. Because either side, even Russia who was the aggressor, deep down they didn’t want a war because they would be afraid that the United States would come over there and just obliterate them with atomic bombs.
IT: Did your daily life change once the Cold War started?
Mrs. Templeton: Not really, no. It didn’t really change that much
IT: Did your thoughts on the war change after your first child?
Mrs. Templeton: No, not when the children were little. You always worry about that with your children when they grow up if there is a war because it’s [unintelligible] with all the weapons and things they have and the nuclear things they have. But other than that they really didn’t change. I think by then…I figured that things were going to level off and be okay as long as everyone kept their eye on what was going on as far as diplomats and the government.
IT: Do you remember how the media talked about the Cold War, Russia and communism?
Mrs. Templeton: There were people in this country that thought communism was great, you know. That all sort of came about after the second world war ended. They were called radicals because they had what were considered really far out ideas, but there weren’t so many that you thought they could take over the country. Back then they started having marches and things like that against the government but they were contained by the police and there weren’t as many as there are now today and it’s crazy because everybody seems to think they have to have a march about everything it seems to me.
IT: So…do your opinions on communism or Russia now differ from what you thought about them back then?
Mrs. Templeton: No, I still think that they are willing to do evil if they thought they could take over the world. No, I think they’d still do it. So I mean, you know, you have to continually keep the lines of communication open between the two and Russia is always testing you to see whether you’ll back down or stand up to them just like with things going on today.
IT: Well, those are all the questions I have, so…thank you for doing the interview.
- I believe the interview went fairly well and probably wouldn’t change much other than asking for details about her childhood, family, and hometown. It flowed well in every area except during the transition from World War II to the Cold War. I found it quite easy to stick to the script for the most part of the interview, but the few times I improvised or asked questions I hadn’t planned on asking went well. The divergences were plentiful, and most were interesting, but I took the time to remove any discussions that didn’t pertain to the topic.