AN INTERVIEW WITH GORDON R. BEEM
FOR THE
VETERAN’S ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WAR AND SOCIETY
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MARCH 28, 2000
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE
INTERVIEW BY
KURT PIEHLER
AND
DAVE GORMAN
TRANSCRIPT BY
DAVE GORMAN
AND
DARRYL AUSTIN
EDITED BY
TIFFANY R. DAVIS
KURT PIEHLER: This begins an interview with Gordon R. Beem on March 28, 2000 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee with Kurt Piehler …
DAVE GORMAN: … and Dave Gorman.
PIEHLER: And before beginning the formal questioning, I just wanted to thank, on the record, Mr. Beem, … retired major of the United States Air Force, for his many generous contributions of books and videos to the library and archives at the Center for the Study of War and Society in honor of his hero, General Thyng. And in beginning this oral history … interview, we want to go way back and … ask you a little bit about your parents, beginning with your father. And in fact, there has been a military connection in your family—your father was a retired sergeant of the First World War. Could you talk a little bit about your father?
GORDON R. BEEM: My father was born in the year 1896 in Summit Station, Ohio, which is just to the east of Columbus. He came from a farm family. His father, Edward Beem, died when my dad was fourteen, and at that point my father became the male head of the family. He had two younger brothers, William and Edward, and of course my Grandmother Beem. His uncles talked to him and told him that they would help keep the family farm together, and it was on that basis that my father continued to go to high school [and] was able to graduate. After he graduated from high school—again, the family still intact on the family farm—he went to a summer school, got himself a teacher’s certificate, and began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse out in the area of Summit Station, Ohio. I have pictures of my dad … outside that school, and there are some barefoot kids, as one would expect at that particular time. When the war—when World War I began, there was [a] question about whether or not my father was going to join the army, which he did do in 1917, and became a member of the 130th Ohio Engineers.
Before he went to war, his grandfather, my great-grandfather, who was known in the area as “Honest Ed” Beem, called him in and talked to him about going off to war. And he told my father something that my dad later relayed to me when I went off to war, and I know he did the same with my older brother before he went off to war during World War II. And that is, Great-Grandpa Beem called my dad in and said to him roughly the equivalent of the following. He said, “Ed, there are two things that a man has to do in his life. The first thing that man has to do is keep his credit good.” He said, “If you borrow money from a man, and you borrow five dollars from a man and you get five dollars back, you go pay that five dollars, because you may soon after, or sometime after, want to borrow ten, so you got to keep your credit good.” He said, “The second thing a man’s got to do in life is maintain his self-respect. You’ve got to be able to look into a mirror, day-after-day, and say, ‘With the talents that God gave me, I’ve done the best I can, and that I have lived up to the expectations of my family.’” With that, my father went off to war. Eventually he ended up in France, with the Ohio Engineers. He was a first sergeant. And I have pictures of Dad, one of which sits in our living room at home, pictured right after the Armistice, taken in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, and it keeps my father with me, although he’s been dead since 1971.
My mother is also from Central Ohio; she was born in Columbus. Her name was Marie Ritter, and Ritter is my middle name. Mom was born in 1900, to my great—my grandparents. And I knew my grandparents quite well, although my Beem grandparents, only my grandmother was alive, and I only barely remember her, since I was a small child the only time that I can remember seeing her. But my Ritter grandparents, the last time I saw them was when I went to Korea in 1951, and both of them were still alive at age ninety and ninety-one. My mother graduated from high school in Columbus, [and] worked for the Columbus Dispatch, in their classified advertising department, until she married my father, and that was at the end of the war. They met in 1920 and were married in 1922. I have an older brother who was born in 1924, in February, on February 10. I was born February 1, 1927, and my younger sister was born October 6, 1933, and her name is Janet. My brother is Edgar Allen Beem, Jr.
My father, after World War I, worked in the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio. He was a bookkeeper and a timekeeper, and we lived in Niles, Ohio, where I was born. My brother was born in the nearby town of Warren. In 1925, two years before I was born, a man knocked on our apartment door and introduced himself as a sales representative of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. And what he wanted to do was sell a small industrial policy on the life of my brother. My mother was curious. She invited the gentleman in. He talked to her at some length, and in the course of the conversation, she asked him: how good a job was it selling life insurance? And he went on to explain how well he was doing as an insurance salesman. That evening, as my mother tells the story, and my father reluctantly agreed, the many times I’ve heard it, when he came home that evening, my mother told him about the salesman who had been there, and she then also said that she had made an appointment for the man who did the hiring for Metropolitan Life, the assistant manager who did the interviewing, to come and see her and my dad. My dad responded in the negative, but in the course of some family discussions, finally agreed to at least see the gentleman, … and so the man came. Apparently he liked what he saw. My father liked what he heard, but he asked my mother a very simple question: “How are we gonna survive, since they only pay fifty dollars a month for the first three months, and we’ve been living on 90 dollars a month?” My mother said, “I’ll go to the butcher and to the bakery and to the grocery store and to the landlord, and I’ll try to make arrangements for some credit, because if you … are as good a salesman as you think you can be, after three months you’ll begin to get your commissions, and you should do better than we were doing with you as a timekeeper.” Thus, my father joined Metropolitan Life in 1925, and he had a career with them that lasted until he retired in 1961. He moved from salesman—route salesman, knocking on doors—to become an assistant manager, where he worked with other salesmen. He then was among the first group of men chosen to be a field training representative, and it was at that point in 1933 that we moved … from Youngstown, Ohio to New Rochelle, New York. My father worked out of New York from 1933 to 1936, received two internal promotions in New York, and in 1936 was named manager of the Portland, Maine District of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. And I can remember where his office was. It was at 465 Congress Street, on the tenth floor of the Bank of Commerce building. The tenth floor had a beautiful corner office that was his, which had a view of Casco Bay, which is the famous bay in southern Maine. Dad was manager of that office until he retired, and essentially from 193[6] until 1950, that was my home.
PIEHLER: I guess several questions come up. I mean, one very immediate one is—your father did very well in the 1930’s, I mean, in a depression. I mean, he got promoted and …
BEEM: All of my father’s promotions were during the Depression. I have to say that we were very, very fortunate. We were never hungry. And we were, I think, moved from his being a timekeeper, we—the family then was probably in the lower class. We moved into the middle class during my father’s years with Metropolitan Life. And it was a comfortable life, as I remember it. In 1940, he bought our first home, and it was the family homestead for forty-nine years until the death of my mother in 1986. So I do remember the Depression, and I also remember how fortunate we were, particularly, I think, when I look back on it and realize the—I remember seeing the WPA [Works Progress Administration], for example, put a sewer in at a street nearby where we lived, and I never realized how fortunate we were until I became a little more mature and began to study history.
PIEHLER: Your father—what did he tell you about his service in France? You told us about the great picture of him in the Pyrenees at the end of the war.
BEEM: They were in—I think—in two campaigns. They were not front-line infantry soldiers, but they were engineers who built the trenches. And he did see combat; that is, they were shelled. Fortunately, he was never gassed, and he was never wounded, but he was with a—I would say, a combat support unit in the engineering company that he was with. He didn’t talk a lot about it. He did tell me about some of the cities that he was in, and the one that stands out in my mind is Nancy, France, which is in Alsace-Lorraine, and I visited Nancy during my military career, many, many years later. He didn’t talk much about World War I. He was a member of the American Legion. He was not particularly active in the Legion, but he always belonged and occasionally would go to meetings. And the Legion was involved when we buried my dad. They provided the Honor Guard, and I still—well, I … don’t have the flag that they had on his grave, since I sent that to my nephew, Edgar Allen Beem III, who’s my brother’s son. All of the Beem family history, photographs, and my father’s World War I medal and his discharge papers, all of that kind of family things are in the hands of my nephew, who is a journalist and author. He has four books in publication. [He is] an art critic, and he writes for the Boston Globe on assignment as well as Down East Magazine, and he’s a columnist for the Maine Times, so he’s the repository of the Beem family history.
PIEHLER: What do you think made your father such a good salesman? And I mean, he really had a remarkable career of advancement.
BEEM: It’s—I say this with a little, perhaps, a grin, and you may want to edit this, but it’s what my kids—and I have three children—call “the Beem bullshit.” (Laughter) My father was a great talker, and I assume that the two of you perhaps later will say, “He’s a talker.” On the other hand, my older brother was unsuccessful as a salesman, and I’ll talk a little bit more about him later when it’s appropriate, and his very interesting career. But I—unquestionably, it was my father’s personality. I remember when I joined the insurance business after graduating from college, one of the things he said to me was that he had always, with his clients, had let the people think of him as “Mr. Beem, the insurance man,” not “Mr. Beem, the Metropolitan Insurance man,” but “Mr. Beem, the insurance man.” And he did that, he said, because he wanted to identify with them; he wanted to be their counselor. And I know from stories that he told that over the years he helped many, many families in the state of Maine, and particularly in the greater Portland area, where his main office was, and also around Bath, Maine, where he had a detached office. So I think it was his ability to relate to people. And he had an excellent command of the English language, although he was not a great reader. The reader in our family was my mother, and my love of books comes, I know, from my mother, but I think some of the leadership qualities that I might have displayed over the years came from my dad.
PIEHLER: Your dad was in the American Legion. Was he a joiner? Did he belong to other organizations?
BEEM: He belonged to the Kiwanis. He was a member of the Portland Country Club. He was a golfer. And he was one of the founders, with two or three other men, of the first Little League in the state of Maine, Little League Number One in Portland. For many years, he was the treasurer of the state Little League organization, and actually was at one time a national officer of Little League. I’m trying to think of what other organizations he might have belonged to. Oh, yes. He was a Shriner, and a thirty-second degree Mason. I was invited to join the Masons, but at that point of my life I was not interested. My older brother is a Mason.
PIEHLER: Your mother—I loved your story about—I mean, she was pretty strong-willed when—because your father was not looking to change careers and your mother determined this was his life path. Was that common for your mother to take that role on when she thought it was …
BEEM: Well, let me tell you another story, then, to answer your question. I mean, I could answer it very easily and say, “Yes,” but a story might be more interesting. When my brother and I were in high school—he was a senior when I was a freshman, and he had a license to drive the car, and the way that worked was something like this: if there was an activity going on at the high school and he wanted to go, … he would first go to my mother, and he would say to Mother, “Mom, there’s a dance at the high school Saturday night, and I’d like to use the car.” And at that time, my mother would say something like, “How have your grades been recently?” even though she knew. My brother would respond, “Good.” And she would say something like, “Well, you’ve been doing the chores, the things that you have to do around here. I’ll talk to your dad about it and we’ll let you know.” Perhaps later that day or the next, my brother and I would be studying in our room together, and we occasionally would leave the door open, particularly when we knew a family conference was going on, because we liked to listen in, and we would hear my mother say to my father, “Ed, Allen would like to go to the dance at the high school Saturday night, and he wants to use the car, and he’s agreed to take Gordon along, because Gordon wants to have a date, too. What do you think?” “Well, I don’t want him using my car. You know it’s a new car.” And we would hear a little discussion go on, and finally my father would say, “Well, since his grades are doing pretty well, and since he’s taking care of the things around the house that we know he has to do, why don’t you say it’s okay?” “Well,” said my mother, “why don’t you call the boys down and tell them?” And, in a few minutes, we would hear my father’s voice call us, and we would go down, and he would say, “I understand you two want to go to the dance on Saturday night.” “Yes, Dad.” And he would say, “I understand your grades are doing well, you’re doing your homework, and you’re taking care of the tasks here around the house.” “Yes, Dad.” “All right, but you gotta be in by 11:30.” And that’s the way we would get permission to take the car, and it continued—I tell you that because my mother was very strong. My mother ran the house. She was a housewife, and she was proud of it, and she raised two sons and a daughter. All three of us are college graduates. My father only had one semester of college. My mother had none, but I think they did well. And my mother was a very strong woman, and she helped my dad, and I think between the two of them, they did a pretty good job, particularly through the Depression. I know for a fact that my father paid the rent on my maternal grandparents’ home from 1933 until their deaths in 1951 and ’52, so he was generous. In fact, some people might have said he was an easy touch, but when people were in trouble, Dad would oftentimes help.
PIEHLER: Your mother, was she active in any clubs or organizations?
BEEM: She was active in the community concert series. She had been a—she was a musician. [She] played piano. She belonged to something called the Rossini Club, and a women’s organization associated with a group called the Woodford’s Club, which was a suburban club that my dad belonged to, and then there was a women’s portion of it. She was not active in the American Legion Auxiliary, and I don’t know that I ever asked her why she hadn’t been. But she was not really a clubwoman, yet she was. I mean, that wasn’t her only interest in life, but she did enough, I think, that—she did what was expected of her, and perhaps a little more in things she was interested in, particularly in music.
GORMAN: You mentioned that she played the piano. Did you have a piano in the house?
BEEM: We had a baby grand, and at my mother’s death, one of my nephews claimed the piano, and we were very happy to see that he got it after we sold the family home. And she had a good voice. She—I can remember her singing. One of my Dad’s favorite songs, and you’ll probably understand this, was “Roses of Picardy,” which was a famous song from World War I. Picardy is an area of France. If you know music, there, it’s a …
GORMAN: I don’t know that one.
BEEM: Yeah.
PIEHLER: I’m curious: You lived in different parts of the country. You lived in Ohio, and then you moved to New Rochelle, which is a suburb of New York City … and then to Maine. And they’re very—they strike me—they’re still very different places, and I’m struck that probably in the ‘30s and ‘40s they were even more different than they are today, because while there [was] national radio, there [was] not national television, and not the malls. Could you maybe talk just a little bit about your experiences of these three places? Because you grew up in very different places, I would think, or I could be wrong, that they’re more …
BEEM: Well, they are different. I have memories of Youngstown. We lived … on 79 North Edgehill Drive for a while, and then on 125 North Osbourne Avenue. North Osbourne Avenue was about a ten-minute walk from Cheney School, where I went to the first grade. There was—and the other thing that I remember about that portion of my life was there was that … there were two football players who played football for Cheney High School, and both of them went on to Ohio State University. They were the Cabelo brothers, and, uh—Johnny and Arzie. Johnny Cabelo was an All-American at Ohio State, and he was their punter, as well as a fullback. Arzie was a quarterback, his younger brother, and also was a quarterback on a single-wing team at Ohio State. And I can remember walking back and forth to school. Other than that I don’t have a lot of memories, except on the occasional trips that we made back to Ohio from both New York and from New Rochelle, and also from Portland. As far as New Rochelle is concerned, I do remember it a lot clearer. I have a scar on my left knee that came from the athletic fields at Iona College. We lived on—I can’t remember the name of the street at the moment, but you walked over one more street and then through the backyards and through some hedges, and we were on the grounds of Iona College. It was run by the Christian Brothers, if I remember right, at that time, and probably still is. The scar came from a track meet, and I was standing too close to the jumping pit, and one of the broad jumpers, after he made his jump, fell forward, and stood up and took another move, and clipped my left knee, and I have about a six-inch scar, so I have a memory of the athletic fields at Iona.
PIEHLER: Were you worried? Were your parents worried about infection?
BEEM: No, they sewed it up, and I remember being operated on. My first operation was there. I had what was called at that time a blood tumor on the base of my spine. And I remember sitting in a barber chair and leaning back, and I broke open the tumor and bled all over the seat in the barber shop, and it was from there they took me to the hospital, and they operated and cut it out. The other memory I have of that period, and it was one that I think is memorable, is it was the period in which kidnapping was a very common occurrence. I’m thinking of the Lindbergh kidnapping, but one of the people that lived nearby us was the family of a dentist whose name was Levine. And he had—the doctor had a son, Richard, and a daughter, whose name escapes me, but the son, Richard, was about my age, which then would have been eight or nine, and was a playmate of ours. I used to play with him. I think her name was Helen, as a matter of fact; Helen Levine. The boy, Richard, was kidnapped. His father apparently was doing well as a dentist. [He] was held for ransom. The ransom was paid, and Richard’s body washed up on Long Island Sound, not too far from New Rochelle. And that memory, of course, something like that, stays with you through your entire life, so it was a period that I remember. But on the other hand, I went to North Elementary—Mayflower Elementary School on North Avenue, and I can remember the name of the principal because it’s a little unusual name. His name was Mr. Pugh, P-U-G-H. And the kids at school, I can remember, were—tended to have comments concerning the principal that I won’t repeat. (Laughter)
GORMAN: Lends itself to that, doesn’t it?
BEEM: And as far as Maine is concerned …
PIEHLER: How old were you when you moved to Maine? Do you …
BEEM: We moved in August of 1936, so I would have been nine and a half, coming up ten. And I remember moving there. I remember the first two people we met. We moved into a house at 230 Bradley Street, in Portland, and we were in the process of unloading the moving truck when there was a knock at the back door, and it was two boys. One of them [was] my brother’s age, one of them a little younger than I, and they were Marty Lee and his brother, [Robert]. Marty was my brother’s age. And they were selling strawberries, and we bought some strawberries from them. And Marty Lee graduated in the same class from high school as my brother. His younger brother was a couple of classes behind me in high school. And it’s also interesting to note that Marty and I played on the same football team in college after World War II…. I haven’t seen him in a number of years….
My memories of Portland are of the back end of the Depression, as it was gradually ending, but the real end of the Depression, of course, didn’t come until the war started, World War II. As I said earlier, I can remember the members of the WPA [Works Progress Administration] putting sewers in. I also remember something that’s a little different. Most of us know the submarine sandwich from the Subway restaurants or take-out places that we see around. The Italian sandwich, I have to tell you, originated in Portland, Maine, and I think it originated during the Depression. I can remember seeing the workers at this sewer project. They would walk about three blocks to a place called Reddy’s Handy Store. The Italian gentleman who owned it had red hair and that’s why it was known as Reddy’s. And they would buy a small loaf of Italian bread, which Reddy would cut in the center [and] fold down. He would put ham and cheese and onion and tomato and pickle and sometimes black olives and olive oil, and that was an Italian sandwich. And I remember that they used to cost fifteen cents at that time. A little bit later I can remember buying them for a quarter. I don’t think Subway would even talk to you today for twenty-five cents. They might give you one slice of tomato, but that’s all.
GORMAN: Maybe. (Laughter)
BEEM: And I also remember the other thing that they used to buy at Reddy’s. There was an alcoholic drink made by the Haffenreifer Brewing Company of Providence, Rhode Island, called Pickwick Ale, and around Maine it was called “the poor man’s whiskey,” because it was rather strong, dark ale.
PIEHLER: What did your parents think of Roosevelt in the thirties and early forties?
BEEM: I think they were very supportive of President Roosevelt. I think at some [point] they realized the country was in trouble. As we’ve already agreed, we were very fortunate. We never had a hungry day and my father had a job during the entire Depression, and got all of his promotions during the Depression. At the same time, there were a lot of unfortunate people, and I think they were supportive of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Somewhat later in their lives, I would probably describe them as a little more conservative. My father and I and my mother very seldom talked politics. I really can’t remember a lot of discussions over the dinner table of politics. But I know they always voted. My mother felt strongly that she should vote, and she did, and I know my dad always voted. How they voted, I don’t think we really talked much about.
PIEHLER: Uh huh. Growing up, I’m curious what you did for fun. What memories stick out?
BEEM: Well, I guess I did two things. I was a jock. I played all three varsity sports at different phases. I was pretty small when I went to high school, so I didn’t play football right away because I was too small. I played tennis for two years on the varsity tennis team. As a freshman, I made the varsity basketball team. It wasn’t—I didn’t make the varsity baseball team until I was a sophomore, but I was a three-letter man, eventually. I was All-Tournament basketball two years running, I was an All-League center fielder a couple of years, and I quarterbacked the football team when I was a senior. I played periodically when I was a … junior. So I think athletics were an important part of my life. I had great coaches. A man by the name of Jack Cottrell was our basketball … coach. He had been an All-American at Notre Dame. Excuse me: he had been an All-American at Colgate; my college coach was from Notre Dame. And he had played against the original Celtics in the old professional basketball league. And at the time we’re talking about, he was in his forties and he used to suit up in long gym trousers and a T-shirt at practices, and when we weren’t doing quite what he thought we ought to do, Jack would get on the floor, and I still have sharp memories, even sixty years later, of his elbows cracking my ribs when we would go up for a rebound together. It made an impression on me that’s lasted a lifetime, and Jack was like a second father to me at that period of my life. During high school days, I had two summer jobs with him. His family owned a country club on Rangeley Lakes, Maine, up in the northwestern corner of the state, called Mingo Springs, and he was the golf pro. And Jack taught me to play golf, and at one point in my life I was a scratch golfer, but that is a lot of years back. But I worked for him two years. One year I drove the station wagon for the resort and did the errands, and the other year I ran the caddie shop. I was the caddie master, and that’s how I got to play a lot of golf. So, I was involved very much in athletics. And the other thing, quite frankly, I did: I chased the girls. But, you know, that’s another story, and probably not worthy of too much …
PIEHLER: So you went to your proms in your junior …
BEEM: I did, and I remember going to the—my brother, who I loved dearly, and I think you will probably understand this a little more—he is not only my brother, but he’s always been one of my best friends, if not my best friend. [Al] was a high school senior, and he took me, a freshman, on double dates. And I think most men who hear that would understand what I’m saying, how indebted I am to him. He taught me, for example, how to preserve my clothes. To this day, I hang up my pants every night on a hanger. I don’t wear the same shoes two days in a row. He taught me a lot about clothes because he valued them. He knew what it cost to buy them. But he also was trying to teach me how to do things right, and I remember that with a great deal of love. There was a period of nearly thirty years, during my military career and my brother working, and then when he went back to sea, where we wrote each other every week, until I retired from the military, and then later was close to retirement from civilian life, we talked on the phone and decided that we would stop writing the letters, simply because they deteriorated to the point of not having a lot in them, other than “Everything’s okay here,” and we decided that phone calls a couple of times a month—but Sunday after Sunday, for over thirty years, we wrote each other letters. So I have a lot of strong feelings about my brother, who was very good to me, and he always took me to a key dance if some—which is not to say that he didn’t do things on his own—he did—but when the car was involved and there was a school function involved, I always tagged along. And I remember he took me to my first formal dance. Pauline Grant was my date, and I also remember pulling the chair out from under her when she went to sit down. (Laughter) Fortunately, another one of the young men there caught her before she hit the floor, but Pauline didn’t speak to me for a while after that. You know, the memories that are called up when you start thinking about these things are—they don’t come up very often, but they’re—so, I played athletics and I also played sports and in-between times I studied, and I was a member of the National Honor Society, and I graduated sixth in my high school class of some 290 students.
PIEHLER: Did your parents expect you—all of you—to go to college? Was that …
BEEM: Yes.
PIEHLER: That was the expectation.
BEEM: The expectation was clear. My father started putting money away when we moved to Maine, into an education fund, and fortunately he didn’t have to use any of that for my brother or for me, since I went to college on the World War II GI Bill. I didn’t have a long period of service, as you know, and I only had enough GI Bill for seven semesters. So, I graduated from Bowdoin in seven semesters by taking, in my junior and senior—well, in the last three semesters, I did four semesters’ work, and during that time, I was on the Dean’s List and a James Bowdoin scholar. So you know, looking back on high school, I played sports. I did date, but in the middle of all of it, I was studying, and I had some great teachers.
PIEHLER: What was your favorite subject?
BEEM: History. And Mr. Cottrell, Jack Cottrell, taught American history, who was the coach. I also had a great math teacher, but the one teacher I remember most of all is Ruth Williams, who was … my junior—junior? Senior. Excuse me. Senior English teacher. I remember her very well when—no, she was the junior [year], because I remember now who was the senior teacher. She was the junior [teacher]. I had her for one full year and I only went part of a year my senior year, because that’s when I joined the Navy. When I—as a sophomore, I won a basketball letter on the varsity, and at that time you could get a letter sweater as a pullover with it knitted in one, or you could get a coat-type sweater with the letter up on your breast. I chose the latter, the coat-type sweater. And I remember at the start of my—I got this in my sophomore year. When the junior year started, the first day of school, I wore my letter sweater, and the second bell had rung for classes after recess, and that was my English class, and I was just a little bit late getting to the door, and I walked in and everybody in the class was seated, and I walked through the door and Miss Williams, who had a rather acerbic tongue, looked at me and said, “The hot shot athlete has decided to join us.” (Laughter) And my face got, of course, very red, along with the acne that I had then, and I started to the back of room to sit down, and she said, “Oh no, Mr. Beem, here’s your seat,” and she pointed to the one right in front of her desk. She said, “We’ve saved this for you.” And so, red face and all, I sat down, but I remember the thoughts that went through my head: “Don’t say anything, Gordon, but she’s never gonna put a red mark on my paper this entire year.” And she didn’t. But Ruth Williams taught me how to use the English language: how to write it, how to speak it. And to just conclude the story, when I got out of the Navy and went to Bowdoin after World War II, all freshmen at Bowdoin had to take a course in English, and so I went to the course, and about the third or fourth class meeting, I realized that everything that was being talked about was in my head. I mean, I knew what they were talking about. I knew all of the ways to use punctuation. All of the things that were being talked about were in my head. I had them by memory, and they were put there, I knew, by Ruth Williams.
I was playing football as a freshman at Bowdoin, and I again lettered in that sport, and when it came time to get our letter sweaters, I again chose a coat sweater, and at Thanksgiving time, I went back home. Portland was only about twenty-five miles from Bowdoin, and high school was still in session, so I put on my letter sweater and walked across the big field from our house to the high school, as we lived quite close to school, and I was waiting for recess, and when recess was on, I walked into Miss Williams’s room. I didn’t want a class to be there, but I walked in, and she looked up at me and smiled, and she said, “You’re still doing it, aren’t you?” And I smiled back and said “Yes, Miss Williams, I am.” And I said, “I’ve come to tell you something.” And I told her what I just told you, and I said, “I have you to thank for that, and I’ll have you to thank for that for the rest of my life.” And she said, “Gordon,” she said, “I always knew you had a good mind.” And she said, “You were a little on the smart-alecky side and I thought I needed a way to motivate you,” and she said, “I thought probably saying what I said would get you motivated.” And she said, “It appears that it did,” and I agreed with her. I stayed in touch with Miss Williams for many years. She went on to get a doctorate, became an assistant professor at a small college in Maine, eventually became a full professor, tenured, and died about ten years ago, still a single woman, but one who … has been very important to me and one who I, in an interview like this, I would not want not to mention.
PIEHLER: You—over lunch, you told us a great story. We asked you about your recollections of the war and I had sort of asked, “Did you think you’d get into the war when Pearl Harbor [broke]?” because some people I’ve interviewed have said when Pearl Harbor broke out, they were at the beginning of high school, so they thought the war would be long over. I mean, in terms of often how high school students think in terms of—a year is ages and ages, but you had said that the war had an impact. You could feel the impact of the war even before Pearl Harbor, and you told two wonderful stories. One a little more sad, but one very, in many ways, very funny.
BEEM: I’m trying to remember. The sad one, I recall.
PIEHLER: Yes, you had mentioned you had a classmate from the class of ‘40
that used
to …
BEEM: Yes. Well, let me tell you about the way we were at that point. The—now I remember what you’re thinking about as funny, and I will tell that as well. Portland, Maine, where I was raised, is obviously a port city, and it is the port for—one of the ports on Casco Bay. Casco Bay is huge. It’s very, very large. The reason that so many of us were aware of the war even before Pearl Harbor, which as we all know is December 7, 1941, [is that] the war in Europe had started on September 1, 1939. And it became apparent in the next—probably within the next six to nine months that the British were having a great deal of trouble, and I think, again, as historians you know this …
------------------------------END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE------------------------------
BEEM: The British were having a great deal of trouble, and our government decided, quite sub rosa, to provide materiel to the British in their fight against the fascists—the Axis, as it’s so-called. In order to do that, it was necessary to ship the materiel across the Atlantic, so there was need for ships and there was need for escort vessels, and these ships had to be stationed somewhere. During World War II, the early part of it, a good part of the North Atlantic fleet was based out of Portland, Maine and out of Casco Bay. I mentioned the destroyer tender, the USS Denabola, which was known around the area as “USS Never Sail,” because as a tender, it was designed to be in a port and take care of vessels when they needed repairs, but it also brought sailors to the community. As we kids recognized, began to see more and more ships, and also began to see more and more sailors, we began to be more interested in what was going on, and I think it became very apparent to us that there was a war, and that it had been going on at least a year by the time we began to really, you know, feel it. In our neighborhood, we had a group of young teenagers, and they went all the way from the youngest—which I was probably among the youngest; there were probably four or five fellows my age that were involved with the group—[to] my older brother, three years older, and then there were some fellows who were a year or two older than that, and we played softball in the spring and summer if we were there, and during the fall we’d play football at the field, because our home was right across the street from the back area of the high school, where there was a baseball field, some tennis courts, and to the left of our house, across a couple of streets was the football field. [The] practice field was behind it. So we used to play on those fields in the summertime and again in the fall, and one of our friends had a large, four car garage at their home, and we played basketball in that when it wasn’t too cold or too snowy.
Among these people, among the older of these guys, was a man named Joseph MacGillicuddy. And when the war started in Europe and the ships began to carry materiel across the North Atlantic, Joe decided that he was gonna join the Merchant Marine. He wasn’t a very good student, as I remember, and although he would have graduated high school, my recollection is that he decided that he would get his diploma in absentia, and he went up to Canada and signed aboard a merchant vessel. Joe made the first trip to England. Actually, I guess they went first to Scotland, and then to England, but he came back and told us all about it, and how it had been, and he told about the submarine threat. Although he said in that trip, his ship had not been involved, although some ships further back in the convoy had been attacked. He went back to Canada, signed on a second ship, and a few months later, the word came to the area that Joe’s ship had been sunk by a submarine, which brought the war very much home to all of us. And it was, I think, fairly clear, as more and more of our friends of that group began to leave, the O’Brien boys, the Howarth boys, and gradually—and then, of course, my older brother graduated in ’42, joining the—going to the Maine Maritime Academy. All of these things made the war pretty close to us. So, that for the serious side. I guess the funny thing that I mentioned was the fact that there were a lot of sailors in Portland.
PIEHLER: And that caused some problems. I mean, … you were saying they could be something of an unruly lot.
BEEM: Well, yes, they’d come in to shore, and some of them on the Denabola might have been homebodies, but most of them came ashore, and there was a bit of rowdiness. It got to the point where my parents suggested strongly—and when my parents suggested strongly, that meant an order—that we not go to town at night. [If you’d] get home before dark, you could go. And of course, with Daylight Savings Time, we could still sometimes be downtown at night. The thing that I mentioned that might have brought a laugh was what happened to the storefronts in Portland. We’re talking about 1941 and ’42 and into ’43, and storefronts in those days, usually you could walk twenty or thirty feet from the sidewalk to where the door opened, and you would have a sort of an inverted “U” of displays behind glass. And because so many of the sailors began to use that area with female companionship for other than lawful activities, the merchants of the area put iron folding gates across the front of their stores. And I can remember going into Portland in a car with my parents of an evening, if we did, or in the bus or the streetcar, and seeing all these storefronts with the gates closed in. I remember I didn’t really understand what it was about until I asked my brother, and my older brother explained it to me in earthy terms, (laughter) and we still even laugh about it when occasionally we get together. It’s one of those things. It’s a memory of World War II…. But to get back to where you were, the war came home to us very quickly with the death of Joe MacGillicuddy, and …
PIEHLER: I don’t mean to interrupt, but why do you think Joe did it? Was it a lark? Did he really want to help the British cause?
BEEM: Well, I—he was an Irishman. His father was an Irish. I’m not really sure that he wanted to help the blokes …
PIEHLER: Yeah.
BEEM: … or the Brits, as much as it was a sense of adventure for Joe. I think it was really more a sense of adventure. It was before we were in the war, and it was the only way that you could get in, into the war, short of going to Canada and joining the Canadian forces. But the reason—we all knew that if you did that, you lost your American citizenship, and Joe wasn’t prepared to do that, which is why—plus the fact that the merchant marine, at that time, was offering substantial bonuses, and I think it was a combination of the adventure and the fact that it was gonna be good pay. And there may have been some patriotism. I mean, I don’t want to say—there was patriotism, probably, and he wanted to help.
PIEHLER: Yeah. But it … sounded like it was a complex …
BEEM: It’s a very complex thing.
PIEHLER: Yeah.
BEEM: But it brought the war home to us very early, and we still talk of Joe occasionally when some of the Maine boys get together for whatever. My brother, who still lives outside of Portland in a town called Westbrook, which is the next town from Portland, he sees a lot of our old friends, and they wonder why Gordon lives in North Carolina, and I explain that to them very easy. I say, “Maine is beautiful from May through September, but from October through April, the ice and the snow has driven Gordon south.” And a lot of others, I’m sure. (Laughter)
PIEHLER: No, I would agree with you because in the summer, it’s absolutely
delightful and
then—I had a friend who was an Episcopal priest, and he described some winter
mornings, on a Sunday morning, before going to church, how cold it was.
BEEM: Yes. And, well, later when we get to my military career, I’ll tell you a little bit about the state of Maine, because I have a good story of there, too.
PIEHLER: … Do you remember where you were when Pearl Harbor occurred?
BEEM: We were on a Sunday drive. My parents—back in those days, you didn’t
call people in advance and go in to visit them. Sunday afternoon was visiting
day, and we had people who would just drop by our house to see us. For example,
we had pictures of a lot of our family friends, and one family that I want
to speak about is the Bennett family. And Mr. Bennett—Billy—and Mr. Bennett,
William Bennett, was the assistant manager in charge of the Bath, Maine
Sub-district office of the Portland, Maine office. In other words, he was
an assistant to my dad, who was the manager of Portland and of Bath, and he
ran—Mr. Bennett ran the Bath office. He had one son, Billy, and a daughter,
Marie, and Marie was an absolutely gorgeous redhead. She is now deceased and
so is her brother, but we had a beautiful picture of Marie, also one of Bill
in his Naval Academy uniform. And the thing I’m thinking about is when a car
would pull up in front of our house on a Sunday afternoon, my mother would
look out and she’d say “It’s the Bennetts,” which was a signal for whichever
one of us was around, including my sister, to head for the dining room, pull
open the bureau drawer, get out the pictures of the Bennetts, and bring them
into the living room to put them on the mantle. (Laughter) My mother was a
very funny woman. If she were here, she’d probably be laughing like we are,
but this was her way of doing things. And I can remember that. Sunday afternoons,
people coming. Or we would get in the family car, and we would drive to Biddeford,
which was a—or Saco, a town south of us, where my father had business friends,
and there was a family named Harvey. The husband, the father of the family
was a judge in … Biddeford-Saco, in the court there, and I can remember [he]
had three daughters. Justine was the oldest, and there were a couple of sons
and we used to drive down there on a Sunday. They’d come to visit us. And
we were on one of our Sunday visits and heading home when my father turned
the car radio on, and there we were, the whole family, sitting in the car
listening to the first report of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And my father
said that he thought that this was gonna be as—I remember him saying something
to the effect that this was gonna be a long war.
PIEHLER: He expected it to be …
BEEM: I remember somewhere in the back of my mind. I hadn’t thought about it when you asked, when we talked about this before, but Dad said something to that effect, and I could tell he was concerned because of my brother’s age. He was pretty sure that my brother would be in it. I’m not so sure he thought I would be, but he knew my brother would at least go, because he obviously knew of the death of our friend Joe MacGillicuddy, and we had talked some about that. But that’s where we were. We were in the family car. We had been on a visit to the Harveys in Saco, and were on our way home.
PIEHLER: How did the war—I mean, the war had affected the town way before the United States had gotten into the war, but how did … America’s entrance into the war change Portland and your world?
BEEM: Yeah. Well, I guess the easiest answer is we began to have friends quickly. I mean, the next day or the day after, there were men who were joining up. You know, fellas that we had known from being a couple of years older. And my brother, who was due to graduate the next June. He was the class of ’42, so he was due to graduate in June, and some of his classmates were leaving, or were talking about leaving or what they were gonna do. Was it gonna be Army, what—and there were some fellas who went to the Marines right away, some who had great combat records. So immediately, because of the kind of relationships that we had, we began to see people quickly go into the armed services. We were much aware of the growth of the ships in the harbor. I mentioned my father’s office on the tenth floor of the Bank of Commerce building before, and you could see the entire—all of Casco Bay, and I can remember being up in his office looking out at the vessels, and also taking binoculars up there to look at the various ships, and I mean battleships and carriers. You know, the whole nine yards were there at one time or another. There was an influx of servicemen. We had two forts in the Portland Harbor; Fort Williams and Fort Preble. The Maine National Guard was shortly activated. Or I guess it had been activated even before the war started. The 240th Coastal Artillery, which was commanded by the father of a classmate of mine, Colonel Kern, George C. Kern. I can remember, he was a—he had a meatpacking business. I can remember the trucks with “George C. Kern” on the side of them. [We] used to get free hot dogs when we’d go see the Kern family, but that’s another story.
So there was an impact of growth of the military presence. The Bath Ironworks geared up even more, where my father’s branch office was. I can tell you, during the war, my father wrote two of the largest group insurance contracts that Metropolitan Life had ever seen. He almost got into trouble for it, because he and Mr. Bennett up in Bath worked not only with management, but they made the cardinal sin of managers at that time: they worked with the union. And then they got a big group contract at the Bath Ironworks, and when they built the New England Shipbuilding Yard in Portland, where they made liberty ships, again my father was able to write the group contract with one of his assistants in Portland, and again he—I would say, this time, he used a back channel to work with the union, but the company finally—once they signed it and the [contract] was in place, I think the company got wind of it, and some of my father’s superiors were probably very good at doing what we in the military called “chewing ass,” and my father reported these, supposedly out of earshot of the family, but I can remember hearing what he told my mother they said to him. It wasn’t de rigueur at that point in life for a manager to work with the unions to get contracts, but that’s … the way it was.
PIEHLER: I’m very intrigued about that. So your father—these contracts that he’s developed, these group policies, were they with the union itself?
BEEM: No, they were with the company.
PIEHLER: Yeah.
BEEM: But in order to get it through, the unions had to agree. You know.
PIEHLER: And he went to the union and said, “This would be good for your members, and …”
BEEM: Well, um …
PIEHLER: I’m just curious how he worked with them, because …
BEEM: Well, my guess is that he talked to the union people directly, but I know he talked with the managerial people whom he knew, and he also had a few political connections that he’d engendered over the years, which I’ll speak about a little bit later.
PIEHLER: Well, it sounds like that he had the sense that to get this to work, he’d have to touch all bases …
BEEM: Yeah.
PIEHLER: If he just went to management, that’s not gonna work, because …
BEEM: Not gonna go.
PIEHLER: Yeah, the union people and the rank-and-file won’t go along and …
BEEM: Yeah, and it was good for the workers; it was good for the management; and I know it was good for the Beem family. And so, all in all, it worked well for everybody, although it wasn’t the accepted way to do things.
PIEHLER: No, I think that’s very—that’s why I partly want to clarify, because it sounds very interesting for the record …
BEEM: Yeah.
PIEHLER: … the historical record. Because it sounds like your father was very open-minded in terms of different groups you need to work with. Is that a fair …
BEEM: That’s fair. And I can tell you that my father died in 1971. Yes, 1971. He was not quite seventy-five when he died. Until my mother’s death in 1986, the members of the staff of the Portland, Maine district were—who continued on after my father’s death—were in touch with my mother frequently. My sense was that my father was a beloved leader, and I don’t think he ever forgot where he came from. That’s … a farm boy from Ohio, who at fourteen was thrown into being head of his family.
PIEHLER: Mm hmm.
BEEM: And he never forgot that, and I don’t think he ever forgot the people who helped him on the way up. A couple of times he had to call in a few chits, but that happens in business.
PIEHLER: Let me make sure Dave speaks up …
GORMAN: Yeah, I was thinking a little bit about Portland during the war, especially with the ship works right there. Do you remember any precautions? Did they put any submarine nets across the entrance to the bay?
BEEM: Yes, there were sub nets, and there were air raid drills. My father was an air raid warden. I still have a belt. I’m not wearing it today. I’ve got my new Coach belt on that I just got at a factory store down in Georgia, but I have a belt at home that I wear with my jeans that was my father’s belt that he got from Civil Defense when he was an air raid warden during World War II. And it’s a, you know, a brown leather belt, with a genuine brass—stamped on the back, “Genuine Brass” buckle, and so I wear it and I think of my dad. And he was involved to that extent. There were, of course, no air raids, but the thing that we did notice is we began to get blackouts. When they realized is that the lights of the city set up a silhouette against which the submarines could see the vessels, we began to have blackouts.
GORMAN: Mm hmm.
BEEM: And I can remember that we pulled our shades and there were—gradually they cut down on the outside streetlights, and they would cut down on the power, so there were precautions taken. The two forts were manned, but—for a while, and then they began transferring the Army troops away because there wasn’t—there didn’t seem to be any reason to think we were gonna be invaded.
GORMAN: You mentioned there was a coastal artillery …
BEEM: … unit.
GORMAN: … unit that was there as well? Did they practice? Were you … aware of it?
BEEM: Oh, sure. Well, we’d been aware all of our lives, because the … National Guard troops would periodically go on active duty in the summertime, and they would fire the guns. They would fire the cannons, so we were used to hearing that, and as kids, we … were allowed to visit Fort Williams and Fort Preble. In fact, I can remember on a July Fourth—oh, it must have been … about 1939—‘38 or ’39 —we were out on Long Island, out in the—not the Long Island down in New York, but Long Island in Casco Bay at the home of some friends, and I had a firecracker, a four-incher, go off in my hand, and it was bleeding, and they were worried about it and they wanted to get a tetanus shot, so they took me in a speedboat across the bay to Fort Preble and to the Army dispensary at Fort Preble, and that’s where I got a tetanus shot. I can remember that. It just sort of came back to me because you asked the question …
GORMAN: Pretty exciting for a ten-year old, though.
BEEM: Yeah.
PIEHLER: You had some close calls growing up as a kid. You, you …
BEEM: Yeah. Well, you know, life is full of hazards as a child and as one grows. (Laughter) But it’s been an interesting life, and I think there—you know, to further answer your question, we were very aware in Portland, with the advent of the fleet, earlier than the war starting, then the expansion. And then the other thing that we began to see, we began to see few and fewer ships, as some of the ships were pulled and went through the Canal and went to the Pacific, and as the submarine menace became less and less important close to the American coast, as they were driven further and further away. And it’s very interesting, the book that I left with you today, this two-volume work, called [Hitler’s U-Boat War] by Clay Blair, which, incidentally, is his last work since he is recently deceased, talks about the submarine menace in it and that it was grossly exaggerated. At least that’s his take on it, as opposed to some of the other authors, about the sea war in the North Atlantic. But we began to gradually notice there were fewer and fewer ships, and then we began to see the liberty ships just come off. They were—yeah, the liberty ships and then ultimately the victory ships. But the liberty ships coming out of that Portland shipyard were—it was like, you know, they were coming fast and furious. I don’t know—I would hesitate to make a guess to what the rapidity was, how often, but they were certainly launching at least one or two a week, once they fully cranked up.
GORMAN: You mentioned also your older brother Edgar. You mentioned at lunch that he had attended—he was in the second class at the Maine Maritime …
BEEM: … Academy.
GORMAN: … Academy. Did you ever visit him while he was in school up there?
BEEM: Yes, I visited a few times, and I also went to his graduation parade. It was—I’m trying to remember exactly how long the course was. It was a compressed course. It might have been fourteen or sixteen months. I really would have to ask him to know exactly, but I know it wasn’t a full four-year program, but it was accelerated and it was a seven-day-a-week operation, and I can remember Al [my brother] occasionally coming home on a brief three-day pass or an overnight when he could. You know, when they were given time off, in his cadet uniform. And I think he graduated either late in ’43 or maybe early in ’44. I can’t remember for exact, I don’t want to say for sure. I would ask him. But anyway, he did go to the Maine Maritime Academy, and he graduated second class. He was at that time granted a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve, but he chose to go to the Merchant Marine rather than the Navy, and he had a third mate’s ticket, was part of that. He was a deck officer, and so he shipped as a third mate, and then during that period he had a second mate’s license which he got, and then went on to—at a later point, when that comes time, I’ll tell you … somewhat about his career, you know, if you have some interest in it. But he went to Maine Maritime Academy and he did serve during World War II with the Merchant Marine, and he did serve overseas and he took several trips to the Mediterranean. And recently, in the last five years, I think you know that they’ve named all of the World War II Merchant Marine veterans as actually veterans of World War II.
GORMAN: Entitled to benefits.
BEEM: Entitled to benefits as veterans. Although when the Korean War came, he was called to active duty as a naval officer, so he was a veteran of the Korean War, having been in Korea. Where that comes in chronologically, we can talk about that, too.
GORMAN: Okay.
PIEHLER: I’m curious: did you have any—did you work at all in high school or before then? Did you have any summer jobs, or …
BEEM: Summer jobs. Remember, I told you about being the caddy master and the taxi driver at the resort. But those were the two summer jobs I had, and I had—but that’s—I didn’t work any time during the …
PIEHLER: During the school year?
BEEM: During the school year, I didn’t work. We had an agreement in the family that any bottles with deposits on them belonged to the sons. (Laughter) I don’t know if my sister did it after we left, because she was somewhat younger. But my brother and I used to split them up while he was still there, and then after he left I had the bonanza of just, of taking the bottles back. Mostly club soda bottles and milk bottles, occasionally Coke bottles. Not very often beer, but my dad liked club soda with a little bit of whiskey in it. He’d have one or two. Never any more than that, but there were club soda bottles. Occasionally ginger ale. So that was our source of money.
PIEHLER: Spending money?
BEEM: Spending money, yeah.
PIEHLER: Did you go to the movies very much, growing up?
BEEM: Yes. Oh, yeah. I can remember going to movies in Ohio. That was a big
deal on Sunday, going to the movies, because—not so much sitting in the movies,
because we’d sit up … in the balcony, and one of the parents would go with
us. Or, during that time, my mother, even in Maine, through the war—well,
after the war years, she always had a mother’s help, a young woman or a woman
who came in five—usually five days a week and would be there from
eight-thirty, nine o’clock until supper was made. My mother did all the cooking,
but she’d have help with the house and the help, the mother’s help, would
go with us to the movies. That was
a—or sometimes my father, if he wasn’t traveling, would be home. He would
take us, but he would drive us, even if he was there, because my mother never
learned to drive. [In] all of her years, never learned to drive. We tried
to get her to learn to drive after my father died, and she tried … school
for a couple of days, and she said, “No deal.” But the other thing I remember
about going to the movies: Charlie Chan, Warner Roland as Charlie Chan. And
I mean, that really goes back, and I can remember the—you know, the Marx Brothers.
But the real key for Sunday and the movies was, the movie was important, but
what happened afterwards was even more important, because we always got to
go to Isley’s Dairy and we’d get an ice cream cone. And they had a dip that
they’d take the cone, and the ice cream would look like the cone, sitting
on top of it. It was like a pyramid, you know, sort of rounded and pointed,
and we used to love those ice cream cones. So my memory is sitting in the
balcony, seeing the movies—Errol Flynn, and Gary Cooper, and The Lives of
a Bengal Lancer, and all the adventure movies. And, of course, Charlie Chan
was great at that point. So, yes, we did go to the movies a lot.
PIEHLER: When did you … have the sense that this would be your war, World
War II? That
this—because you would enlist on December sixth, 1944, into the Navy, and
…
BEEM: … Well, what was happening was everybody was following the war, and we were talking about it in our classes, particularly in our history classes. And it came to the realization after the invasion of Europe, and the work that was going on in the Pacific, the island-hopping. I think some of the guys in my class began to think that we were gonna get left out of the war. And on that particular day, there were three of us, myself [and] two friends of mine, Ronald Cole, known as “Ronky,” and Charles Augustus Bonnie, Jr., known as “Chuck,” and the three of us enlisted together. We had a picture in the newspaper of us with—me with a baseball bat in my hand, and I had not the white hat of the Navy, but that winter hat, the black—the blue one, the real dark blue with the “U.S. Navy” across the front of it. There was a picture in the paper and, you know, they ran it on the sports page because of the athletic competition I’d been involved in, and there was a lot of hassle about it, whether I was gonna be available for the basketball season. (Laughter) Those kinds of things came up, but there was a concern on the part of some of the fellows in my class that we were gonna get left out, and so a number of us did what I did: we enlisted. I was sent home for a while, on active duty without pay, and then was called to active duty. But you know, my part in World War II is minimal. I’m a veteran of World War II because I did serve, and I did get out in the Pacific during a period of time that qualified me for an Asiatic-Pacific campaign ribbon along with the American theater, but I didn’t see any combat, although the vessel I was assigned to had seen some combat earlier in that period. I went to Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago for their boot camp, and then was in a couple of radio technician training programs when I asked for sea duty, because I wanted to get to sea before the war was over. I just barely managed to get out there before the signing in Tokyo Bay. Although I consider my—I am a veteran of World War II and was eligible for the G.I. Bill, [but] Korea is really my war.
PIEHLER: Yeah, I mean, you really do come in at the tail end. I wanted to ask you specifically about, I guess—one is, why the Navy? And I’d like you to, if you could recollect a little bit about the naval station at the Great Lakes, because I’ve interviewed someone who went roughly the same time period, and I’d be curious whether your recollections match his. I won’t tell you what they are.
BEEM: Okay.
PIEHLER: But why the Navy? I mean, there’s a big naval presence where you are. Is that …
BEEM: Yeah, that’s part of it, but the real … reason is—I’ve got to back up a little bit. Earlier in the interview, I talked about Bill Bennett. That is, the Bennett family, Anne Marie, who became a nurse and who was, as I said, a very beautiful redhead, but a lot older than myself. I could only, you know, look up—in fact, she was a little older than my brother, so I don’t—but her brother, Billy, or as he was known to us, went to the Naval Academy, and was a graduate of the Naval Academy class of either—he was in one of the “hurry-up” classes [at the] first part of the war. But he was sort of a … role model for me, his father and my father being associated in business. And I had known Bill before he went to the Academy, although I was a little boy, but he was always nice to me, and when he went to the Academy, he used to—they’d stop in when he was on leave, or we would go see them when he was on leave, and we had a picture of Bill in his uniform. And I wrote my eighth grade civics class career paper, and the title was “My Career as a Naval Officer.” So there was a lot of reason for it. There was Portland, Maine and the Navy presence there, and … Bill Bennett, who was a role model.
What happened in all of this was, my plan was to go to the Naval Academy,
and I took the preliminary examination given by our Senator, who was then
Ralph O. Brewster, and who my father knew reasonably well. Well enough to
ask him to consider me for appointment to the Academy. So I took the first
preliminary mental examination, which I passed, and I went for the preliminary
physical examination. And this was when I was a junior, and if I remember
it rightly, it was after—the junior year wasn’t over yet, but I was playing
on the baseball team, and actually, at that point, was leading—I had the leading
batting average in the league, and I had been a All-Tournament basketball
player in the season just ended in Western Maine. When I went to take the
physical examination, they told me I didn’t have 20/20 vision, which was a
requirement for the Naval Academy, and which then cut me out of consideration
for the Naval Academy. My coaches were stunned. The baseball coach couldn’t
believe that I didn’t have 20/20 vision. He said, “That’s just not possible.”
And the football coach, Jack Cottrell, and basketball, because he was both
football and basketball, he said, “Gordon,” he said, you know, “I don’t believe
this.” So, I mean, we had the family physician test my eyes again. Actually,
I think we may have went to an
ophthalmologist. I think we did go—but anyway, I didn’t have 20/20 vision,
so the Naval Academy was out.
PIEHLER: But you were pretty close, because …
GORMAN: You led the league in hitting. You must have had some good eyes.
PIEHLER: Yeah, I mean, if you weren’t 20/20, you weren’t that far …
BEEM: Well, I was far—I think it was probably maybe 20/50, but at that time, it was 20/20 vision or nothing, so all that being the way it was, the Navy was the place. I did have one friend, Freddy Seales, who lived down the street from me about four houses away, who was a year ahead of me in high school. He joined the old Army Air Corps and [it] then became the Army Air Forces, and he flew B-24s out of Italy, was a gunner on a [B-]24 and flew eighteen or twenty missions through—maybe did the whole tour, but I know he came home with a couple of air medals. But it just seemed to me that all my background and all my thought processes had always been Navy, so that’s how I joined the Navy.
PIEHLER: Well, I guess, one of the reasons I wanted to ask you—I know you much more identify with Korea, but you bring a unique perspective to this interview in that you served in … two different services, and I think of the Navy and Air Force as very different services.
BEEM: Amen.
PIEHLER: So I wanted to ask you a little bit—I guess, beginning with [the] Great Lakes facility and your recollections of—of course, you were used to cold weather.
BEEM: Oh, the cold weather didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the hard-assed petty officers. I mean, I can remember—I don’t know, the third or fourth week of boot camp, when we were getting ready to get an overnight pass to go into Chicago. And incidentally, Chicago at that time was great. It was—I’m trying to remember the name of the mayor at that time. It will come to me. But everything was free. You rode free on the trams, and you could go into the ball games at Wrigley or at Comiskey Park, was free …
PIEHLER: Because you were G.I.?
BEEM: Because you were G.I. And if you could get into a bar, which some of us couldn’t, (laughter) but we always tried, and sometimes we would get into the bar, the drinks were mostly free. I mean, somebody would always buy the drink for you.
PIEHLER: So this is a pretty good life, in some ways, if you can get a pass.
BEEM: Yeah, if you can get a pass. So in walks the chief, and he had on his hat with the white cover on it, which he walked through the door, and the petty officer in charge of our company called us all to attention. We’re all at attention. The chief walks in, and he had on his white gloves as well as his white hat, and he took off that brimmed cap and he stood there in the doorway, bent over, and scaled that hat down through the opening area between two rows of bunks, and he walked slowly down to it, picked it up, and said one word—“Restricted” —and walked out. [Be]cause, I mean, the hat was dirty, so that meant the floor was dirty. The deck was dirty. Excuse me; I should say deck. The deck was dirty, and so we got our asses reamed out by the first class petty officer, who was—I don’t know if he was gonna be docked or not, but we all were. We spent the whole weekend cleaning that place up. That’s a clear memory of—and they were really hard-nosed with us. But …
PIEHLER: What about the food and the—did you have enough food?
BEEM: Oh yeah, food was fine. The weather was cold, and it was snowy and rainy. Chicago is that way that time of year. But after I finished boot camp, there were about six primary radio technician schools in the country that they sent you to, and then you went from primary to advanced, and some guys went on beyond that. The school that I selected on the paperwork was Wright Junior College, and … I put a couple others, but I had Wright Junior on the top. Wright Junior is located on 3500 North Addison Avenue in Chicago, (laughter) and I got selected for Wright Junior College. It was a six weeks program and, man, did I have a ball. I mean, in Chicago, I was a seaman first class, which was the same as a corporal. I had enlisted into that program, and I had gotten, instead of being a seaman apprentice or a seaman recruit—that is, E-1 or E-2—I was an E-3 right from the get-go, and was during the entire period, so I had a little more money than some of the guys. I bought myself a suit of tailor-mades, first. In fact, I had the tailor-mades in a locker downtown. I’d had them made in Portland, where there were many made-to-order uniform stores because of all the navy that was there. Well, the tailor-mades are beautiful, not that suede, that felt-like, or that wool stuff that we had, but they were—I don’t know what the kind of material they were, but they were bell-bottom trousers, and they were spiked at the knee and belled at the bottom, and they were zippered around instead of buttons. I mean, they were gorgeous. And I think I was the only guy in the—at Wright Junior who had these, but I was careful about how I wore them. I can remember that. But it was a good period. Then I went from there to a place in California that’s now the famous hotel. Oh, damn. What is that hotel on the coast near Monterrey? [The Del Monte Hotel]
PIEHLER: Yeah, I’ve heard of it, and I …
BEEM: I can’t remember it, but what we’ll do is we’ll pause here, leave a little bit, and then fill it in.
PIEHLER: That’s right. (To Gorman) Or on the transcript you can just fill in …
BEEM: Or I may think of it later.
PIEHLER: I’m curious, in terms of your radio training, because I think if there’s one link, in looking at your pre-interview sheet, is that you would end up initially in the Air Force doing messages, communications. And is that a link between the Navy training [and future service]?
BEEM: No.
PIEHLER: No, there is no link at all.
BEEM: There is no link at all.
PIEHLER: And your training in the Navy focused—I mean, you’re in radio school. Are you focusing on radio repair or maintenance?
BEEM: Well, … actually, it was radar that they were teaching us.
PIEHLER: Oh, so you were learning radar?
BEEM: Radar, yeah. And I was gonna be a radio technician, which are radar technicians who could repair those things, but I got into it and I wasn’t all excited about it, and when there—when it came chance to go to the third school, you could also ask for sea duty.
PIEHLER: And that’s when you decided …
BEEM: That’s when I said, you know, “Let’s go to sea. I mean, I want to get in this before it’s over. I’ll stay in these schools and, baloney. Let’s see what sea’s like.” So I went to—that’s when I went to sea.
PIEHLER: And when … did you report? When did you come aboard the USS Athene?
BEEM: Uh …
PIEHLER: Do you remember, roughly?
BEEM: It was in the late summer. I could probably reconstruct it from what you got here, but I can’t really actually remember.
PIEHLER: It was almost when the war was just coming to an end, really, in another week, few weeks.
BEEM: Yes, it was right at that point. You had to serve—let’s see, how did it work out? I’m trying to remember. You had to have been out, in order to get the Asiatic-Pacific [Medal], you had to have been out before the end of ’45, I think.
PIEHLER: Mm hmm.
BEEM: And we took a trip to Guam and came back. That’s the way I remember it. But I can’t really remember the exact—it was probably in August. That’s what I’m thinking, the last few weeks of the war. I don’t think—I’m not sure whether the bomb had been dropped. I know the bombs were dropped on August 8 from the Enola Gay and I think, on the 12 … on Nagasaki [The bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9]. It could well be after that, and before the armistice, before the signing of the treaty, but I’d have to jibe that with …
PIEHLER: Yeah.
BEEM: This is probably—would jibe my memory if we really looked at it. But I, you know, as I said, I didn’t see any action, although the ship had seen action earlier.
PIEHLER: What was your duty aboard ship?
BEEM: I was in the first division of the deck gang.
PIEHLER: So, you did not do any of your—you had all this training on radar, and you did …
BEEM: Nah, I resigned from their program, and I wasn’t rated, and when I got aboard ship, they looked at me and said, “We need somebody in the … first division of the deck gang,” and I said, “Fine,” so …
PIEHLER: So you were really, as I might use the term, a common sailor. You really …
BEEM: Yeah, I was a swab jockey. (Laughter) You know, I can hear it now. The whistle would go, the boatswain’s whistle would go, and the voice on the P.A. system would say, “Now hear this. Now hear this. Clean sweep-down, fore and aft. All first division fore, second division aft,” and we’d run …
------------------------------END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO------------------------------
PIEHLER: This continues an interview with Gordon R. Beem on March 28th, 2000, at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, Tennessee, with Kurt Piehler …
GORMAN: And Dave Gorman.
PIEHLER: … You were just, as the first tape was running out on the interview, … you were saying you could still hear the whistle and the call for the first crew to …
BEEM: First Division.
PIEHLER: First Division to …
BEEM: Right. First Division was always the forward division and the Second Division had the after-part. We had—it was an attack cargo ship, and we had some LCVPs [Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel; a.k.a. ‘Higgins boats’], and I was hoping eventually that I’d get assigned to the LCVPs, but that never happened. I just stayed. I was with the First Division. We made one trip. We were gone—I don’t know—six or eight weeks, out in the Pacific and back again, and at that point, they were beginning to wind down what was happening, and I was transferred from there to the Philadelphia Naval Receiving Station, was put aboard a yard oiler: YO-230, I think. The yard oilers, we went around the Philadelphia Navy Yard fueling the various vessels. It was like a big tugboat.
GORMAN: Had you been aboard an ocean-going vessel before?
BEEM: Uh …
GORMAN: Or was that the first time?
BEEM: Well, on the [USS] Athene was the first time I’d been.
GORMAN: For the first time …
BEEM: Yeah.
GORMAN: Was that—did you have any difficulty getting used to the routine or getting used to the seas? Any stories about rough passages or anything?
BEEM: Well, no, I don’t think that I—you know, I’d been on a number of boats, a boat being something that you can haul aboard a ship in the—you know, off the coast of Maine, fishing boats and pleasure boats of family friends and so forth. Both my parents did not like the water. Neither of them … swam. I can remember once coaxing them together to get on a eighteen-foot boat that I owned, but that’s in the [19]60s, so I won’t think about that, but they were not sea people. My brother is a born seaman. I’ll tell you about him, as much interest as you have. But I didn’t have any problem with sea legs. I don’t ever remember being sick. I know we were in a couple of minor storms. But I didn’t particularly like the sea. I think it’s important to note that, because it has some bearing on the rest of my military life.
GORMAN: Sure.
PIEHLER: Well, one question, I guess, because … when I said there’s a real difference between—I’ve been struck by the real—there’s certain commonalties in the services, but there are also—I’ve been more and more struck by how different they are. And I’d be curious for you to reflect, because you were an enlisted man in both the Navy and the Air Force. You later become an Air Force officer, but you were originally enlisted. What’s it like to be an enlisted man in the two different services? If you could reflect on that.
BEEM: Um, well, let me see if I can, I can give you just a quick—I tell stories sometimes to make a point.
PIEHLER: No, no, we love those stories.
BEEM: Let me turn to Korea. And I am a buck sergeant. My brother is a naval officer, a lieutenant junior grade. No, he’s a lieutenant senior grade at that point, full lieutenant, which is the counterpart of an Air Force captain. My brother was—came to visit me in Korea, and when he came with a friend of his, who was also a full lieutenant, Bob English, they came aboard an Australian Air Force Dakota, which is the same as our C-47. I’ll later tell you about that. But anyway, he came to visit me at Kimpo Air Base, and I’m a buck sergeant then. When he got off the plane and came to the headquarters of the 4th [Fighter Intercept Wing], he told the wing sergeant major who he wanted to see, which was, you know, his brother, the sergeant. And the wing adjutant, a major, for whom was my official officer boss at that time, knew that I was in Portland—and that’s more of a story, too—but he asked my brother and his friend. He said he could make arrangements for them to stay in the BOQ, Bachelor Officer Quarters, and my brother said, “Thank you very much,” but he’d like to stay in my tent if it was possible, because he said, “I haven’t seen my brother for a year and I would like to be with him.” And so, the adjutant gave permission for him to stay in my tent, since we had two empty bunks at that time in a six-man tent. [That was] story one.
Story two: about five, six months later, I got an R&R. Now I’m a staff sergeant, one more promotion, but I’m still an enlisted man. My brother is in Iwakuni, [Japan]. [He was] the chief engineering officer of the AVP-40, the Floyd’s Bay, a seaplane tender. So the Aussies fly me over to Iwakuni, and that’s another story, how I got in so good with the Aussies. But they flew me over, and when I got there, I called my brother on the ship, which was tied up there. Seaplane tenders are like destroyer tenders. They pull in someplace, they tie up, and the seaplanes pull up next to them. My brother said, “Tell the adjutant to get a cab for you and to take you to Hotel So-and-So.” So, I went to Hotel So-and-So, whatever it was, in the cab, and it was like they rolled out the red carpet for me. I couldn’t understand that until my brother showed up, and they did the same thing for him, only except a lot more so. I said, “What the hell is all this, Al?” and he said, “Well, I’m the senior shore patrol officer in Iwakuni.” And I said, “Oh?” And he said, “Yes,” and he said, “They’re very nice to me.” And the reason that I was in the hotel was that enlisted men are not allowed in “officers’ country” aboard a Navy ship.
PIEHLER: Even if you’re related.
BEEM: Even if you’re related.
PIEHLER: And even if you’re an NCO [noncommissioned officer].
BEEM: Even if you’re an NCO. If I’d been a second lieutenant, I could’ve gone there, but my brother couldn’t have me in his cabin or in his area. So, I mean, it just—it wasn’t, I mean—tradition prohibited. In fact, I guess, I don’t know that it was really law, but I think it was regulation that enlisted people were not allowed, except the steward’s mates, or some of the people that worked there, but he couldn’t have me there to stay with him.
PIEHLER: Could that …
BEEM: And the point I’m making with the story is, that’s a clear difference between the Air Force, that operates a little more informally, and the Navy, which still has a lot of tradition. And of course, we’re talking about the year 1951, ‘52, so, you know, that’s a lifetime ago.
PIEHLER: Although … we have a current—we have a naval officer who retired a few years ago, and she said some things about the Navy really haven’t changed. (Laughs)
BEEM: Yeah, well, I know they haven’t and so—but I make the point that … there is a sharp distinction between officer and enlisted. A lot sharper in the Navy than in the Air Force. The Air Force is a lot more relaxed.
PIEHLER: Did you have stewards on any of the ships? On the Athene?
BEEM: Yeah. They all were blacks. The crew was partially integrated, as I recall. There were some members of the deck gangs, but we had steward’s mates who were the cooks and bakers. Actually, they were—a lot of them—were mess attendants and they took care of the officers’ mess.
PIEHLER: You had initially dreamed of being even a naval officer, going to the Naval Academy, which is a real aspiration, and you increasingly—it sounds like you increasingly became disillusioned with the Navy.
BEEM: Um …
PIEHLER: That’s—is that a fair?
BEEM: That’s more than fair. I would probably have lasted at the Naval Academy a few weeks. I would’ve surely rebelled at that stage of my life against the iron-ass discipline. I’m sincere in that, and I’m glad, when I look back on my own career—I always wanted to be a military officer and I achieved that goal, but it’s a very circuitous route that I took to it, and yet, it led me into a profession that I carried over into civilian life, and where I think I was able, both in the military, and in civilian life, to do some good work.
PIEHLER: Well, partly, I find your comments even more intriguing, because you become an officer, I mean, and you have a military career, so it—I’m struck by your—you still remember very vividly how much you didn’t like—the expression often was used, if I recollect, in World War II, you couldn’t stand the chickenshit in the Navy. Is that …
BEEM: That’s another amen. Maybe that’s a double amen.
PIEHLER: You found that it was even above the good order that was [necessary]. I mean, parts of discipline even—I’ve never been in the military, but I sense some of this is necessary for good order and discipline, but you thought—and I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but you thought it went above that necessary for good order. Is that …
BEEM: It probably went—I think some of the traditions were that way. I can understand the need for response to orders. I mean, when the alarm bell goes, general quarters is sounded, you go to general quarters, and you’re going there with your life at stake, probably, because general quarters is normally called for when you’re going into combat or you’re in danger. And I understand that, and I understand—I mean, we were bombed—nothing real serious—in Korea, but we had nighttime intruders who dropped bombs on our airfield, primarily to keep our pilots awake during the period I served with the 4th Fighter, but when the alarm rang, it was time to get into the hole. I mean, we went out to our dugouts, and got to where we would be safe, because we wouldn’t have been safe in the tents if there had been anything. But I think that the some of the things, some of the traditions, I would not have been—I was not amenable to it as a Navy enlisted man. I had my troubles and …
PIEHLER: Which tradition? You mentioned not getting leave because there was a little dust on the floor, and it got the hat [dirty]. Is there any other one, customs or traditions, that you remember, that really irked you as an enlisted [man]?
BEEM: Well, no. I think the—sometimes the division between North and South came up. I mean, I was a Maine Yankee. It was known I was from Portland, and I had a first-class petty officer knock me on my ass, physically. I mean, he punched me in the side of the face because I didn’t react quite the way he thought I ought to when he called me a “damn Yankee.” I had a response that I probably should’ve swallowed, but I didn’t, and so I swallowed the knuckles. And we had a little wrestling match, and he was a little bigger and stronger, but, you know, that’s the way it was. I’m—but I, you know, having experienced the enlisted status, both as a Navy enlisted man and as an Air Force enlisted man, I never treated the people who worked with me the way I was treated. I never forgot the way the Navy treated me. I thought it was in some respects beyond the pale, but that was the way it was, and I suppose if I had been in earlier, I would have adjusted to it and done whatever was needed to be done to survive, because that’s the human animal. But on the other hand, when I became an Air Force sergeant, and had people responsive to me, I didn’t forget that I cleaned the latrines and heads, and in civilian life, when I was CEO of a hospital, I never forgot where I came from. And I know I got that from my dad, and also from, you know, my own hard experience, through some of these days. But when the Korean War came, and maybe it’s time to …
PIEHLER: Let me just ask one or two questions about your G.I. Bill.
BEEM: Okay.
PIEHLER: You had talked a little bit about the G.I. Bill, and it sounds like you really thrived at Bowdoin.
BEEM: Yes.
PIEHLER: And I guess one question that I have is, why Bowdoin? I mean …
BEEM: I’m reaching for Joshua Chamberlain, the new book, A Hero’s Life and Legacy, by John J. Pullen, and I’m gonna turn to page sixty of that book, because … there’s a very interesting statement, and this is one of the reasons I’m gonna send it to my brother. (Reading from the text) “Bowdoin has always been thought of as an elite institution. In Maine, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, Bowdoin was the college attended by sons of the better-off families in town, and there, they expected to meet the best class of boys from other states.” Bowdoin was the best of the schools in the state of Maine. There wasn’t any question about that. I mean, from the point of view of those of us who lived in Maine.
PIEHLER: And growing up, that was …
BEEM: And growing up, Bowdoin was the school to go to.
PIEHLER: You hadn’t considered other … schools in other states?
BEEM: No. Well, the—when I found out I couldn’t go to the Naval Academy; I knew I couldn’t go to West Point, so, I mean, the academies were out. So then, the high school that I went to was one of the finest high schools in the state of Maine, Deering High School, in Portland. And there were certain high schools in the state—I think there were three or four—where, if you were in the National Honor Society and in the top ten graduates of your class, you were certified to Bowdoin, which meant that you didn’t have to take any entrance examinations. You were an automatic admission.
PIEHLER: So there’s a real drive. There’s a real—that makes it a lot easier …
BEEM: Well …
PIEHLER: … to get in. I mean, if you’re …
BEEM: Yeah. Well, first of all, the attitude that I read to you …
PIEHLER: Yeah.
BEEM: ... from the book by Pullen, about Chamberlain, about what was—how the school was seen, plus the fact that …
PIEHLER: You were already going to be admitted.
BEEM: I mean, I was admitted.
PIEHLER: Yeah.
BEEM: I was admitted to Bowdoin while I was still in the Navy. I mean, … when I graduated sixth in my class and a member of the National Honor Society, I was an automatic admission. I was certified to Bowdoin, so there wasn’t any question. If I wanted to go to Bowdoin, I was gonna go to Bowdoin. So I came back to Maine, and I had sort of half-thought that I was gonna stay in Maine for the rest of my life, so being a Bowdoin graduate in the state of Maine is damn good. I mean, it’s—you know, there’s a network. And there’s also, at that time, the fraternity structure was very strong.
PIEHLER: And you joined a fraternity?
BEEM: Oh yes. I was a legacy of the Alpha Delta Phi. My brother was—who had gone a semester before. He had got out of the Merchant Marine and went to Bowdoin ahead, so he was a year ahead of me, so I was an automatic pledge to Alpha Delta Phi.
PIEHLER: I’m curious, since you mentioned a fraternity, and one of the things that I’ve been doing a lot of work on [is] the impact of the G.I. Bill on Rutgers. I’m curious on Bowdoin, in terms of fraternities, did you have hazing? Uh, were you hazed in your fraternity?
BEEM: Well, uh …
PIEHLER: Because I’m curious. In terms of the GIs, there was a real tension at Rutgers. Some of these GIs were not going to be hazed.
BEEM: Yeah, well, the—when we came back after the war was over, there had been a lot of the guys who had got out and had started in the spring of ’46. I didn’t get there ‘til the fall of ’46. And I was an automatic, as I said, legacy to Alpha Delta Phi, because my brother was a member of Alpha Delta Phi, and he got pledged there because there were three or four friends that knew him, and that’s how it happened. I’d call your attention to a book, recently written by a Bowdoin graduate, called The Pledge, and if you’re interested in fraternities and the impact of fraternities, it’s worth looking at. I can’t remember Rob’s last name [Robert Kean] at the moment, but you, you’d find it. It’s within the last six months or a year it’s been published, and I read it and sent it to my brother so he could read it. But it’s about fraternity life, and this is a young man, who is about a class of ’93 at Bowdoin. Anyway, there were several things involved. There was a pledge class; there were songs to learn, there was ritual to be memorized, and secret words, and all the things that went with it. And there was some hazing. You know, jump up, do a little serving, but when I—I went to Bowdoin in the fall of 1946. I had gotten discharged in July. Football practice started in August. And so I went up for football practice, … along with a man by the name of Ed Gillen. We were the quarterbacks in a Notre Dame T-formation, early T-formation program. It wasn’t a program then, it was a team. But that may tell you how I feel about programs. Anyway, it turned out that Eddie and I sort of split. School started in September, fraternities pledged, and there was a pledge season, and there was some hazing. Not very much, but some.
PIEHLER: Well, then …
BEEM: Well, let me finish.
PIEHLER: Oh, yeah. No, I just …
BEEM: A little part of it. The big deal in the hazing was the “freshman walk,” and what that was, was the seniors, and whoever was the pledge master and his group, they took the pledges, usually in a truck, and they drove around the area, and would drive and drive and drive, and they’d drop you off someplace, and you had to get your ass back to school, you know. So on that particular night, they took me out, and they dropped me in the town of Gorham. And so I walked a fair distance until I could get to a phone, and I made a phone call to a friend and suggested that I needed a ride, and he brought me back, but I had walked some blisters on my heels. And so I got back to the college finally, partly by walking and partly by a ride. But I walked back into Brunswick, let’s put it that way. The next day at practice the trainer looked at my feet when he was wrapping my ankle. He said, “What the hell is this?” I said, “Well, I got some blisters last night.” He said, “How the hell did you—” He said, “Did they take you on a freshman walk?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said some words that … aren’t appropriate for this.
PIEHLER: But, he was not pleased.
BEEM: He was not pleased, and he went to the coach, and the coach went to the athletic director, and the athletic director talked to the dean. And, of course, I became almost a pariah. Because we had a game coming up that weekend, [and] they were worried whether or not I was gonna be able to play. So, I have to tell you that the hazing went on. And there were some of the guys that were really were very irritated, that they thought I had complained about it, and frankly, that’s not true. It’s never been true, but I’ve even heard about that at a couple of reunions.
PIEHLER: This issue is still brought back up.
BEEM: Yeah, the fact that the president of our fraternity got his ass chewed out by the dean for taking me on a freshman walk, and probably was gonna fix it so I couldn’t play. Well, fact is, everything was okay, and I did play, and I think we won the game. But they eased up a little bit, and I paid for that in a number of ways. So yeah, the hazing was there. Most of the veterans didn’t like it. And I know, for example, several combat veterans, I mean fellows who had really seen combat, who used four-letter words very strongly and threatened … certain actions that would have been distasteful to the hazers, and I think the hazing was less in those days.
PIEHLER: Yeah, I’m just trying to get a gauge, because it sounds like it was a bit stronger at Bowdoin than at Rutgers, where it was very tough to keep college traditions up.
BEEM: Well, traditions … stayed, but it was a little less. It wasn’t what happened in the several years afterward. I think that once the veterans got out of the schools, the fraternities got a stranglehold again, and it’s only in the last few years that Bowdoin has done away with their fraternities. In fact, I think they’re all gone now. The houses have been bought by the college.
PIEHLER: But, when you were there, they were the dominant presence on campus.
BEEM: Oh, yeah. They were, and they were the center of all the social activity. But on the other hand, I got married between my freshman and sophomore years, and my brother got married the next year. And I commuted part of my sophomore year, and then we had an apartment together, he and his wife and my wife and myself. So I don’t have a lot of ties to the college, other than I make my annual contributions. The college is important to me in the sense that it provided me with an excellent education, a fine liberal arts education, and …
PIEHLER: Did you play football the whole four years?
BEEM: No, I …
PIEHLER: Or three? Seven semesters, I should …
BEEM: I played football three of the four years, and I was the first freshman
to win three varsity letters since the turn of the century. Of course, the
hooker in that is that before the war, freshmen weren’t allowed to play. But
I got three varsity letters my freshman year in football, basketball, and
baseball, and I played baseball and basketball my second year, and football,
and I played
football …
PIEHLER: So, you were something of a jock. I mean, even in [college] that carried over from high school.
BEEM: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
PIEHLER: And your major was, in Bowdoin?
BEEM: Government and history.
PIEHLER: So, that continued—that interest …
BEEM: That interest. I’ve had a lifelong interest in history.
PIEHLER: You mentioned—actually very moving, your remembrance of your high school teacher, English teacher.
BEEM: Mm hmm.
PIEHLER: Any teachers from Bowdoin that really stick out?
BEEM: Oh yeah. Ed Kirkland. Yeah, Dr. Kirkland, an American historian of great note. Thomas C. Van Cleave, another historian with a half a dozen books, all of whom—Dean Kendrick was a History teacher, English history. They were all very, very important, and probably equally important was my football coach.
The second and third years I played Adam Walsh, who had been captain and center of the “Four Horsemen” team at Notre Dame. He was—and was the—very interesting person. He … coached at Bowdoin before World War II, and when the war came, Bowdoin closed down its football seasons and essentially closed the college, and then they opened it up again with what amounted to ROTC-type programs. But Adam came down to North Carolina and was recruited to be the coach of the North Carolina preflight team…. There was a great team, North Carolina preflight, and Adam Walsh was its coach, and they whipped the backsides off everybody, because they had a lot of the old pros that had gone. Adam was so good at it that in 1945, when the war was over, the Cleveland, then-Cleveland Rams—I’m not sure that a lot of people really realize that the Rams started in Cleveland, but anyway, they did—and Adam was hired to be the coach of the Cleveland Rams for their football season of 1946, and they won the national pro championship under Adam Walsh’s coaching leadership. His quarterback was Bob Waterfield, who is a great football player, but whose other claim to fame was as the husband of Jane Russell. And Adam went with them to California when they moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles and coached out there in ’46. In 1945, they won the national pro championship. In ’46 he coached there, and then in ‘47 he came back to Bowdoin as coach, and I played for him two years.
He was a great leader and a fine man, and, you know, taught me a lot about myself, and showed me some things that allowed my game to get better. For example, he changed my stance in kicking. I’d been the Bowdoin punter the year before, and he changed my stance and added about ten yards to my punts, simply by something that—he showed me a different way to hold the ball and drop it.
And, it’s—you know, I think a lot of Adam. He’s now gone, but he came back to Bowdoin and did a great job. So, yes, there are some professors. I used to stay in contact with Dr. Kirkland, particularly. Dr. Van Cleave was a colonel in the Army during World War II and was an intelligence officer, and I stayed in contact with him after the war, after I got out, and particularly when—I wrote to him when I got commissioned, and we had a—you know, had a few letters back and forth and some phone conversations, and when I was stationed in Maine, I went to visit him at the college a little bit later. So, yes, there are some memorable people, and I would not want to mention—not forget—Mr. Wilder, who was assistant to the president and was the advisor to our fraternity, who was—he was instrumental as an interceder, when some of the brothers were a little unhappy with Gordon as a freshman. He was a fine man.
PIEHLER: You were Class of 1950 at Bowdoin. What did you think you would do, in college, when you graduated?
BEEM: I knew what I was gonna do.
PIEHLER: And that was?
BEEM: Go to work for MetLife.
PIEHLER: Really? That was the …
BEEM: I had one ambition when I graduated from college. I wanted to make five thousand dollars a year before I was thirty. That was my ambition.
PIEHLER: Which then was a good sum of money.
BEEM: Well, yeah.
PIEHLER: Which is great in terms of students reading this interview, because
I think we’ve
lost—they’ve lost sense of what dollars—what dollar figures mean.
BEEM: Well, I mean, I used—Tuesday nights I went to work for—I graduated on a Saturday, the second or third of February, 1950. On Sunday, I took the train from Portland to New York. On Monday, I went to One Madison Avenue, which was the home office of MetLife, to begin my training as a Metropolitan Life insurance agent. I was Debit 52 of the Portsmouth detached office of the Dover, New Hampshire district. I couldn’t work for my father, and there was—he didn’t want me to work anyplace else in Maine, so I went to work in New Hampshire for a friend of his, Arthur Mills.
PIEHLER: And how did you like the insurance business?
BEEM: It was fun. I …
PIEHLER: You did enjoy it?
BEEM: Yeah, I—apparently I did pretty well…. I think they started me at seventy-five dollars a week or something like that, and what they did was they pooled all of your commissions for the first three months, and then at the end of the three months, they did what was [called] in the jargon of the business then—you broke your quarter. And then for the next quarter, you had a stated income. I mean, your commissions were put together with your percentage from the collections that you made. You know, I was a collector\salesman. I went around and collected money from people.
PIEHLER: Which is now lost in insurance, because it’s all—it’s almost all by mail.
BEEM: Oh, it’s all gone. Yeah.
PIEHLER: Yeah, but then you did the—you would make the rounds and collect.
BEEM: Right. I was—I had a book. I mean, I had played with those books when I was a kid, going to my father’s office. I mean, it was fun. What had happened is, I told you I had been married between my freshman and sophomore years, and my then-wife would not leave the state of Maine. She would not leave Portland. And so we—when I graduated, I said to her, “Peg, I can’t get a job here. I want to work for Met, and the only place I can work for Met is in New Hampshire.” And she said, you know, “Work for somebody else in Portland,” and so we separated. I mean, it had been building up, probably for a number of months before that, but …
PIEHLER: But even though—I mean, New Hampshire is not—I mean, Portland and New Hampshire are not that …
BEEM: Fifty miles.
PIEHLER: Yeah, that’s not … like you wanted to move to Pennsylvania. Yeah,
or …
BEEM: Yeah. And I would tell you, so that you understand this, Peg and I are very good friends.
PIEHLER: So you’ve remained in touch, after you …
BEEM: Oh, yeah. Well, we have a daughter together, and my current wife—there was an estrangement. For a number of years, my second wife would not have anything to do with the child of the first marriage, and so there was a—and I never put my foot down, unfortunately. But anyway, when she passed away—there after we were divorced and then she passed away—why, we’ve had a coming together. And it was all facilitated by my current wife, who said, “There’s no reason for this,” and if you could imagine, she arranged a week in the Florida Keys, where my … first daughter from my first marriage was then living, and she—we brought my daughter down from Connecticut, and we brought my first wife down to the big condo that we rented, and we had a family get-together, a family reunion, and it worked. And Peg is a good friend now. She is—when I was operated on a year and a half ago—she’s a nurse—she said, “If I’m needed,” she told Jeanne, my wife, she said, “If I’m needed, call me and I’ll be there.” So, but anyway, that’s what happened at the time, and there was an estrangement, and I can understand why it all happened. I don’t like what I did, but my daughter and I are very close at this point. Andrea, as well as the other kids.
PIEHLER: So you were a Metropolitan—you were selling insurance just like your dad, and the Korean War breaks out in June of 1950.
BEEM: Mm hmm.
PIEHLER: Um, you were in the Naval Reserve. Were you worried that you were to be called up?
BEEM: Oh, yes! (Laughter)
PIEHLER: You were more concerned about—I guess one question that I have is, why did you stay in the Naval Reserve?
BEEM: Real simple. When it came time for me to get discharged, in July of 1946, I was transferred from Philadelphia to Boston, to the Naval Station in Boston down on Sumner Street. I can see it now. Gymnasium—and a lot of us swab jockeys and white hats, as they’re called or whatever, we were in the place. There must’ve been three, four hundred of us. Up on the stage walks a chief petty officer, with gold on his right arm from here to here.
PIEHLER: All the way up there.
BEEM: All the way up, and the ribbons, and it was all gold. He was a chief boatswain’s mate—boats—and so he calls attention, so everybody stands. We were all standing up, I guess. I don’t think we had seats. I think we were just standing around. Anyway, he said, “Okay, you’s guys, you’re gonna get discharged. That’s what you’re here for, that’s what we’re gonna do. Now let me tell you how we’re gonna do it.” He said, “Some of you guys are gonna want to get a complete discharge.” He said, “On the other hand, some of you may want to join the Naval Reserve. Now let me tell you how the discharges are gonna go: If you want to get discharged completely, it’s gonna take us thirty, maybe forty-five days. Now, if you want to join the Naval Reserve, we can probably get you out in two or three days, ‘cause all we have to do is just release you to home. [We] don’t have to do all the paperwork we have to do for these guys. So if you want to get discharged from the Navy completely, go to the starboard. If you want to join the Naval Reserve, go to port.” If it had been a ship, it would have rocked to port, because everybody went to the port. At least, not everybody, but most everybody, including me. And, I was discharged on July 11, 1946 from active duty, seaman, first USNR [U.S. Naval Reserve] to inactive duty, U.S. Naval Reserve. So, I was a prime candidate for recall. I mean, I knew that.
PIEHLER: And, you were fairly—I mean, you were very young. I mean …
BEEM: Oh, yeah, I was twenty-four. I was twenty-four years of age and separated from my wife, and I knew it was in the process of a divorce. For about two … years, I had been seeing ads in the newspapers for candidates to go to Air Force Officer’s Candidate School. So, I started thinking about what was going to happen. And, you know, I had sent away a couple of times for information from these places, but it always ended up with recruiters, and I was a little leery of recruiters. Somehow that summer, I was in Portland—or maybe it was just early in the fall—and one of the coaches at Deering High School, who had come on since my time, but who knew me and I knew him, had been a Marine. And he was a Marine captain, reserve, and he was gonna be recalled. And he said to me, “What are you gonna do, Gordon? What’s gonna happen?” because he knew I was a reserve. He said, “Well, you know, why don’t you get a commission in the Marines?” He said, “I can help you with that.” And I thought, “Hmm.” So he starts some paperwork with the Reserve guys, with the Navy, with the Marine recruiters, and they offer me a Marine second lieutenancy. And I mean, I’m gonna go to Quantico … to Platoon Leader’s School. That was the deal. You know, I was gonna be a second lieutenant, but I also gotta go to school. Well, then I realized what Marine second lieutenants do, and I had a few second thoughts. Maybe some third and fourth thoughts. Anyway, at this time I was—I began to play around. I wasn’t doing quite as much insurance business as I should have been, and my father’s friend let my father know that I was rushing off to Boston or New York on Thursdays instead of waiting ‘til Friday night and staying until Tuesday, instead of coming back to work Monday, and you know, the—so my father said to me, “Look,” he said, “you owe Arthur a little bit more than that.” And he said, “Now, if you’re gonna go, go. And if you’re gonna stay, why, go to work.” At which point my brother got his recall orders to the Navy, and that scared the living hell out of me, and I went down to the First Naval District in Boston and asked them what my status was and they told me, “We’re gonna call you sometime after the first of the year.” They told me that, clearly.
PIEHLER: Is this first of the year 1950 …
BEEM: ‘51, yeah. And I thought to myself—well, you know what I thought. (Laughter)
PIEHLER: You hadn’t been too fond of the Navy.
BEEM: No, I wasn’t too fond. And the Navy, in reality, probably wasn’t fond of me. But be that as it may, I went to the—I decided I better do something, because I owed it to my father, and Arthur Mills was a good friend. In fact, he was one of those families occasionally we visited. So, I went to the Navy—to the Air Force—and said, “I want to take the OCS exam.” So they sent me to a place in Massachusetts, where I took the exam, and I passed the exam. So I’m a qualified OCS candidate, and I said, “When will I be called?” and they said, “Well, there’s a class in January and there’s another one in April. Maybe you can get in the January class. We doubt it. But April, probably.” Well, I tell my father this and he said, “Come on, now. Are you going to go to work?” and I said, “Uh, yeah.” So then I started working a little harder, and then I went to the recruiters and I said, “What’ll happen if I enlist?” And they said, “Well, these—you know, your paperwork will follow you.” (Laughter) And you know, I still was a gullible twenty-four-year old, I guess. Maybe a little more sophisticated than I had been, but not enough. So anyway, what I did was, I told my father I was going to enlist. He said, “Okay.”
So I resigned, took a leave of absence from MetLife, which is what you do in—you don’t resign; you just take a leave of absence to go into the military. So I enlisted in the Air Force [on] February first, 1951, my birthday. I was twenty-four then, I guess. Yeah, twenty-four. And they sent me down to Otis Air Force Base. I was there about ten days, and I get a letter in an envelope that had been sent to me by the landlord from the apartment that I had rented at 141 Maplewood Avenue in Portsmouth. And inside it was another letter—Air Force—but a corner of it was burned, and I looked at the date, and the date was way back in December sometime. Yeah, it was way back in December. I still got the thing back in my files at home. So anyway, I open it up, and I’m an airman—I’m a PFC, because the Air Force hadn’t gone to airman yet, but we were—I was a private first class at Otis Air Force Base, and in the supply squadron. And I get this letter and I open it up, and it says, “Dear Mr. Beem” —not “Private” —“Dear Mr. Beem.” And in it, it says, “Although you’re sufficient, … concerning your application for Air Force Officer Candidate School, your composite scores were sufficiently high to include you in consideration for the January 1951 class. However, they were not sufficiently high to include you for selection.” You know, “You will be considered for the April of ‘51 class…. Blah, blah, blah, by the order of,” and so forth. So I am now a PFC on a four-year hitch at Otis Air Force Base, and I ain’t going to OCS. Well, I say, “Shit, make the best of it.” And I had—I, when I graduated, I’d bought a ’49 —no, a ’50 Ford coupe. That was the family car, you know. It was a two-door sedan is what it was. After the separation, I went to work for MetLife. I thought I oughta have a little more sporty vehicle, so I turned that in and got myself a ’49 Ford convertible. Black, with a gray soft top, and those big, thick, white—I’ve still got some pictures of it, and …
PIEHLER: It’s a car—it sounds like a car dear to your heart.
BEEM: Oh yeah. It’s a great—a great wagon. Okay, here I am at Otis Air Force Base. I’m a PFC, I’m making PFC money. I’m in the supply squadron. I’m working in a forms warehouse, and I decide I gotta figure out a way to, you know, make that money stretch. So I did two things. I decided to use my car as a taxi, and on weekends, I’d carry guys from Otis, which is Falmouth, Massachusetts, up the Cape to Boston and drop them off. Or there was a guy that lived up the line a little bit. I forget which town it was, but I dropped him off at a diner. I can see it now, on the right-hand side of the road, and there was a guy from Portsmouth I’d carry—well, I’d carry five, six guys, and I’d charge them ten bucks a round trip or something, and I really made enough money to really enjoy myself. I was also carrying guys from Otis and Falmouth over to New Bedford, because New Bedford was where a lot of the guys hung out; a Portuguese fishing town.
I made corporal in May, and it was at that point that I noticed in the paper that the Falmouth Playhouse was opening Memorial Day, 1951, and I had made corporal just before that in May. So, off I go in my cord suit, you know, civilian cord suit. I think it was a blue and white one, if I remember. Anyway, I go to it and am standing in the bar of the Falmouth Playhouse, her opening night, having a drink, and who walks in but an Air Force colonel with his wife and two other colonels. And at this point, reentering my life, is Harrison Reed Thyng. And I had realized that he was there because when I went into the orderly room of the supply squadron and I looked at the command line pictures, there was our squadron commander, and our group commander, and then at the top was the wing commander. And there sat Harry Thyng, and he was the commander of the 33rd Fighter Interceptor Wing. They were flying F-86 Sabre jets. So, he sees me over there at the bar, and he waved at me. He walks over with the other two colonels. They were in uniform, looked great. They had their best dress on. There had been something going on at the post on the base, and so Harry says, “Hi, Gordon, how are you?” and I said “Fine, Colonel.” He introduces me to the other two colonels and their wives. And he said, “Did you finish up at Bowdoin?” and I said, “Yes, sir. I graduated in February.” And, he said, “Well, what are you doing now?” And I said, “I’m in the Air Force, Colonel.” And he said, “Oh, where are you stationed?” I said, “Over at Otis.” He said, “Oh, I didn’t hear anything about you coming on board.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think they advise the wing commander of the arrival of every PFC or corporal.” He said …
------------------------------END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE------------------------------
PIEHLER: You recollected he was shocked that you would …
BEEM: Yeah, he was shocked that I was there.
PIEHLER: And told the other colonels …
BEEM: … how he’d known me, from the—he had been air instructor with the Maine National Guard after World War II. He, in fact, established the Maine-New Hampshire-Vermont Air National Guard. And the Maine Guard commander was a Bowdoin graduate, who happened to also be an Alpha Delta Phi, and he had come to Bowdoin with the then Colonel Thyng a number of times when I was playing football, and that’s how I’d originally met Harry Thyng. So, he—and we had met and talked a few times, because football is—I’m sure you know—has some resemblance to war, and particularly air war, and so we talked about tactics and how we’d developed some of the tactics in the football—I mean, you attacked the flanks, or you attack a weak point if you can find one, or you mass your forces at a particular point. I mean, all the things that are classic tactics in the military are the same kind of tactics that are very often used by a football team. Anyway, they kind of laughed and thought it was funny, particularly when he told them how he knew me. And the bell rang for the play to start, and he said, “I’ll … send for you next week some time.” I said, “Fine, Colonel.” So I went to my seat and didn’t think any more about it. I was pretty sure I’d hear from him, however, ‘cause he didn’t very often say things lightly. I knew that about him. I also knew about his background as a fighter ace from World War II. I don’t know whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week, [the] phone jumped off the hook in the supply warehouse where I was working, and the sergeant I worked for, I could hear him on the phone saying, “Yes, Sergeant. Yes, Sergeant. Yes, Sergeant. Yes, Sergeant. Right away, Sergeant. Yes, Sergeant. Right. Right.” He puts it down and he says, he said—a fellow named Jefferson Davis Gentry. I remember him like yesterday. He looks at me and says, “Beem! Beem!” He said, “You’re in trouble. That was Kennedy. He wants your ass in that orderly room right away, and he said to get your damn blues on.” He said, “What have you done? What have you done?” I said, “I don’t know what I’ve done.” He said, “Well, it must be something bad if Kennedy wants you that bad.” He said, “Get going! Get going!”
So, off I run to the barracks—not run; I went pretty fast. So I got to the barracks and I put on my blues and I went down to the orderly room and I reported to Sergeant Kennedy, who at that time, in 1951, had twenty-two or twenty-three years service, so he had been around a long time, and he was one of the old soldier types. And he said to me, “The wing commander wants to see you. Why does the wing commander want to see you?” And, I said, “Well, I happen to know the wing commander.” “How do you know the wing commander?” And I told him the story I just told you. He looked up at me and said, “You ‘f’ college boys.” And I said, “Sergeant?” And, he said, “That’s enough. Go out and get in a staff car. They’ll drive you down to wing headquarters.” So I went down to wing headquarters, reported to the wing sergeant major, had to tell my story briefly over again. Okay, he wanted to know about it. He said, “I’ll tell the wing adjutant,” and he brought it and told it again, and they sent me in to see Colonel Thyng. And I went in and gave him a salute like I should, and he asked me to sit down, and we talked for fifteen, twenty minutes about what had gone on since we had last seen each other, and how I got in the Air Force, and I told him the story of OCS, and he smiled. He didn’t quite laugh, but he smiled and he said something like, “Par for the course.”
He said to me, he said, “I’m gonna tell you something. It’s not commonly known here on the base. A few people know,” but he said, “Don’t say anything to anybody about it.” I said, “Fine, Colonel.” He said, “How would you like to go to Korea?” And I said, “To do what, sir?” And he said, “Well, I’m gonna need somebody in the wing headquarters of the 4th Fighter Wing,” and he said, “I think you can do the job that I want somebody to do.” And I said, “Could you tell me what that is, sir?” He said, “There are gonna be certain things that I want done, that I want done by somebody with intelligence.” And he said, “There’s gonna be some writing to do, there are gonna be some things that are important,” and he said, “I’d like to have somebody there that I know personally and can trust.” And I said, “Well, I—” you know, “I thank you for all that, and if you want me I’d be happy to go.” So he said, “Well, go back to the supply squadron,” and he said, “don’t say anything to anybody, just tell ‘em that you were here to see me based on the fact that we’d know