(A) Charles Snyder Interview, History 150 Spring 2019, Conducted by Matt Runyeon, March 8, 2019
2.
(A) My interview was conducted in person. I didn’t have to edit too much, but I did have to cut out a few repeated questions and a few noises. I had to contact my Grandfather, and he met me at my house. I used some software on my phone to record and ran a few tests to be sure it would sound good. I made sure we would be in the basement so it would be quiet and we wouldn’t be bothered. I didn’t run into any obstacles, and the interview went flawlessly.
(B) Charles Snyder was born on December 16th, 1939 in Downtown Baltimore, only a few months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland to officially start World War II. His father was in the Navy, so he lived with his mother and grandparents in a small home near the city. Mr. Snyder would then go on to join the Navy and move all around the world for the service during the Cold War era. He lived in many different places, including Morocco, Japan, California, Texas, and more. He has had 3 children, 2 Daughters, and 1 Son. He is now retired and lives with his wife in a suburb outside of Baltimore City.
(C)
One of the memories Mr. Snyder remembers fondly from his past was when King Mohammed the fifth of Morocco passed away. He talks about how his death was a scary time, and considering he was so well loved, people reacted poorly when he died. I needed to find an article that talked about Morocco after his death, and the one I used was about how he protected the Jewish people of Casablanca. Hurowitz, Richard. “You Must Remember This: Sultan Mohammed V Protected the Jews of Casablanca.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 25 Apr. 2017, www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hurowitz-moroccan-king-mohammed-v-20170425-story.html. While this article talks specifically about Jewish people, it showcases how well loved he was, and how people reacted after his death. I trust this source because it comes from The LA Times, which is generally considered to be trustworthy. It is a mostly factual article and doesn’t contain opinions.
The second article I used comes from google sites, and it is about the containment of communism in the 1960s. “1960s – Containment of Communism.” Google Sites, sites.google.com/site/containmentofcommunism/1960s. Mr. Snyder talks about how communism was a huge topic when he was serving in the Navy, and how they were always being trained on what it was and how they should deal with it. The article discusses many hot topics that dealt with communism during this time, such as the Cuban missile crisis, the issues with Germany and the Berlin wall, and other events dealing with communism happening during this era.
The third article I referenced was from American Heritage magazine and was written in 2004. The article Discusses the biggest changes in the United States from 1954-2004. Gordon, John Steele. “The 50 Biggest Changes In The Last 50 Years.” AMERICAN HERITAGE, www.americanheritage.com/50-biggest-changes-last-50-years. Mr. Snyder discusses the feminist movements and how the role of women has changed, especially when he was living overseas. This article helps to reinforce that. I believe that this is a trustworthy article because American Heritage magazine is generally known to be unbiased, and this article was factual and not opinionated.
TRANSCRIPTION
MR: Hello Mr. Snyder How are you today?
Mr. Snyder: I’m fine and yourself?
MR: I’m good. Would you like to give us just an introduction to you and who you are?
Mr. Snyder: My name is Charles Snyder. I’m 79 years old and I’m an ex-Navy man. I’ve a bunch of different things in my life, but the predominant one has been the Navy.
MR: All right. So, my first question for you is how did you feel when you first enlisted in the Navy?
Mr.: Snyder: My father had been Navy before me. He was a Navy Seal Beach on World War 2. My uncle was served with Eisenhower staff during the war. I was born just before the invasion of Poland. So, a lot of my thinking is colored by the military already so excited not so much as accepting of the fact that I was at one time or another probably going to go in the Navy.
MR: Ok, so what was it like trying to raise a family while you were in the Navy?
Mr. Snyder: It’s difficult because you move all the time. We moved eleven times in 13 years at one stretch. My kids were all born while we were in the service. I have one born in Africa one born in California and one born in Japan. When you work a watch schedule like I worked in the military it makes it difficult to be home when you need to be home. Sometimes your wife is about ready to pull her hair out because you’re not there to help out. It can be a challenge.
MR: What were some main cultural differences that you experienced in the different countries that you lived in such as like Morocco and Japan?
Mr. Snyder: Morocco was interesting because that was actually my first assignment overseas. I was 19, recently married, my wife was at that time pregnant. She came to Morocco to be with me. We didn’t have any family there. We made friends as we went but most of the friends we made were military. We were very cautious about going out and experiencing the local economy. There was a lot of unrest. The Moroccans had just kicked the French out. There was still a lot of resentment toward the French. The French still owed most of Morocco in one way or another, and the Moroccans resented it. Americans were resented by both the French and the Moroccans, so it meant that you kind of had to tap dance around things.
MR: So what kind of things did you experience after the death of King Mohammed the fifth of Morocco?
Mr. Snyder: That was a scary time. We didn’t have any idea what had happened. He died, and when he died, oh, by the way I should say he was pretty well loved and respected by the Berbers. The Berbers are perhaps the truest inhabitants of the country. Moroccans are a mixed breed of all nationalities coming from the Gibraltar area like they do. And they would come in, tribes would actually come through town on the way to Rabat which is the capital to pay homage to the king. They would come through town and there would be hundreds of these camels, donkeys, horses, long rifles 6, 5, 6, foot long black flintlock, black powder flintlock rifles. They would be shooting them in the air while they were screaming. So again, you had to tiptoe around, you had to make yourself as inconspicuous as possible. As it was, there was some question as to if we were all going to be shipped out by the military. In other words, pack all the families up and move them out of the country real fast. They were preparing for that.
MR: Were you living on a base in Morocco?
Mr. Snyder: No, living in town. Living right above the main drag in a small apartment, a two-room apartment, right above the movie theater. So, every night at six o’clock and eight o’clock they’d ring the damn bell to tell people that the movie was going to start. You couldn’t sneak a nap in the evening. There’s just no way. But we lived downtown.
MR: Did you ever like fear for your safety while living downtown?
Mr. Snyder: Yeah, especially during the time the king died. There was another time when there was local unrest in the city, and that was just on a local level not on a national level. But perhaps those two times. But you’re also very naive when you’re young you believe that you’re bulletproof that nothing’s going to kill you or hurt you. That is until you have a child, then all of a sudden, things change.
MR: What would you say to the main differences were between living in Japan and living in Morocco?
Mr. Snyder: Totally different cultures, completely different ideology. The Japanese are very polite people. At least they were when we were there. I would, I would go back there in a minute to be honest with you, to either country but different for different reasons. The Moroccans are a little bit more suspicious of strangers and outsiders. The Japanese, not so much suspicious as too polite to step forward. They’ll Stay toward the back. If you go into a crowd or anything like that the Japanese will make way for you, if you go into a crowd of Moroccans, they’re not moving. You got to go around them.
MR: What kind of differences did you experience between the area like where you were raised as a child versus the areas where you lived in when you were an adult?
Mr. Snyder: Well the ironic thing is, the areas that I lived in as a child are pretty much the areas I live in now. It’s everything that went in between. From the time I got old enough to go into the Navy on my own, and until we came back as a family twenty-two years later, the difference is magnified by the fact that we had a lot of internal culture change here in the United States, but I wasn’t in this country when the changes were taking place. Everything I knew about it. The gas lines for example, a lot of the civil rights marches by King. Those types of protests, feminist movements, anti-war movements in Vietnam. All of that took place, I was pretty much out of the country with my family. So, we never experienced the anti-war sentiment because we were on a military base in Japan while it was happening here in America come back it’s like culture shock.
MR: What kind of jobs did you do on the side when you were living in the different countries?
Mr. Snyder: To make the dollar. First job I had beside the Navy job, was I got a job playing bass and a dance band because I actually made more money on the weekends than I did out of my Navy pay for a month. So, in a weekend I could make more money than I would in a month in the Navy. I did that. I worked a little television I had my own television program for a while in Japan. I had a radio program that was also in Japan. Gosh, I don’t know what else I’ve done since I’ve gotten out of the Navy I’ve been mostly management positions until I retired.
MR: How was the concept of communism generally perceived in the different places you lived?
Mr. Snyder: Well, the Japanese are somewhat socialist. They tend to have a culture that is based on our system of representative government. After World War 2, General MacArthur ensured that feudalism, as it was known in Japan, could never come back. The King could never have the power or the Emperor I should say, would never have all the power he had before the war. So, MacArthur very craftily designed a system that allowed them to both voice their opinions and have their representative stand up for him. In Morocco, the culture there doesn’t allow for dissension there is a tribe, and the head of the tribe is the senior man in the tribe. And that’s just the way it is no matter what else you’re going to do. If he says no it’s no. Whether you like it or not there is no vote.
MR: Did communism and the general concept of communism during the Cold War when you’re in the Navy did that like impact the sort of things that you would have to do when you were working in the Navy? You know the sort of like assignments you had?
Mr. Snyder: Of course, you’re always preparing for the possibility of war. That’s the only reason for a military is to fight a war either to defend yourself or to attack your enemy. Communism was our enemy. We were constantly being trained on how to deal with it. And for that to be able to succeed, you have to have intelligence, and you have to have good solid intelligence. And so most of the training that we were going through during the 50s, the 60s and even into the 70s was how do we get better, and how do we get more intelligence than we had yesterday.
MR: When would you say that the Cold War kind of reached its peak, when you were in the Navy?
Mr. Snyder: Well Reagan’s years is when it reached its peak. That I was already out. So, it was nice to be a civilian and see that happen. Reagan really brought down communism because we all spent it. We caused it to go broke, it couldn’t afford to keep up with us. We almost went broke ourselves. Look at our debt today.
MR: What kind of social changes have you noticed since you joined the Navy versus when you eventually retired?
Mr. Snyder: When I joined the Navy, things were still and I’m using this term advisedly black and white, and I don’t mean it in the sense of skin color I mean as far as either it’s right or wrong it’s either correct or incorrect. We tended to be very very rigid in our thinking about things. We didn’t allow for the possibility of degrees of anything. Everything was very structured. Today things are so fluid that it’s very very uncertain as to where we’re going to be in 30 years. I am not a child of today. I’m a child of that pre-war and more period and so I have a tendency to fall into that line and I want to see things. I want things to be good or bad up or down black or white but that’s just not going to happen today.
MR: So, when you were a kid and you were growing up and then to when you eventually joined the Navy, to when you retired, to now. How have the different time periods impacted the way that you live your life and do things?
Mr. Snyder: That’s a good question. I’m not too sure I’m prepared to answer it completely. When I was growing up as a kid I had values that were assigned to me by my family. I was expected to do certain things, act a certain way, be a certain person OK, behave myself, be polite never, argue with an adult, always see a cop if you got a problem, right that type of thing. Get off the sidewalk if an older couple was coming down the street and one of them had a cane or was hobbling, You better get off the sidewalk and make room for him or my mother would have boxed my ears. It just was not polite to not do that. So that is as a small child. As I grew into my teen years we were starting to experience the rock and roll era, it was just beginning and people were revolting against society and everything it stood for. We were listening to that music that we were all going to go to hell to listen to. I mean it was, so there was a dichotomy there. I was trained one way I was raised one way now I’ve got this freedom that I didn’t have before. When I went in the Navy they took that freedom away again. Now I’m back to where I was before I became a teenager. I’m gonna go by the book it’s on this way for a reason and that is because it makes the most sense. When I got out of the Navy, all right, I’m a parent with kids. I got teenagers. I cannot afford to let them get away from me. All right, So I just went back again to the way it was to a certain extent prior to being a teenager. Today, today all I want to do is just pull the covers up over my head sometimes time and say I don’t know what’s going on. All right. It really is a very unsettling time for me in a lot of respects I see things that I can almost predict you’re going to go wrong but nobody’s listening to me so.
MR: Did you ever think that the times would ever be like this when you were a younger person?
Mr. Snyder: There’s no way you can forecast that, look at the civil rights movement for example. My goodness. When I was a kid, we used terms toward each other in our neighborhood that today would have people screaming bigot. We never assigned negative values so much as we did just identifiers, but we use terms that are socially unacceptable today. I could not have forecast any of this. The bottom answer to that is no. And somebody who said they could, I doubt if they’re telling you the full truth. They may have been able to forecast a little bit just based on their own you know lifestyle. But to think of something like Selma when I was 6 or 7 years old? No way. No. It just never entered my mind.
MR: What was your favorite country or area that you lived in when you were in the Navy?
Mr. Snyder: Favorite city in America is San Diego. I would go back there without question. The favorite city in Japan would be Kyoto, the old imperial city. In Morocco I liked Rabat, it was a really nice city, it had the old wall, but Marrakech is probably the one that I think is best remembered. Then there’s the Roman ruins at Volubilis, that was quite significant. Kasbahs palace in Tangier. I would go back to any one of them.
MR: Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Snyder. I appreciate your interview. And thank you very much.
Mr. Snyder: You’re more than welcome.
- If I could do the interview over, I would definitely have used a different recording software. While the sound quality on my phone was good, it would have sounded better if I had used a microphone with my laptop. We rarely went off script, but I felt like it flowed very well. Since my grandfather and I are so close, the conversation felt very natural and went off without a hitch.