986 24 26018 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/46e0b2639f211d86f98c945d7599f6fb.pdf dd7588c369ec86e3ffeec8988a0c1084 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19700508 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970-05-08 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 14 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/efc36a1e401d1f212818bb5044e2531f.pdf f00b43214d29ffdfffcd8d45a643879d PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19700605 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970-06-05 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 15 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fec49f6c79858ed9401a11921f3d90f5.pdf ee9f02b704d70f0a17741a817b1789ac PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19691003 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-10-03 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 2 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e960ee77544d39ac593af7def251b964.pdf 18b76d90b37efecdf919b21e8e122cfc PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19691020 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-10-20 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 3 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5eee764cbcc37cd7a130676763e5cee3.pdf a1e00f9061b89e987be2bb2a51753731 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19691031 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-10-31 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 4 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6170d6f378e80005b07f880ebd02c1fa.pdf 12a0fecc601b3b2ea97b0cfa38d0cf92 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19691114 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-11-14 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 5 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/021bc874c1af4cf15f4054f29a0c8bac.pdf 576a9f7780088e65ac24609898d04ce9 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19691205 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-12-05 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 6 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/92b122cb62f01f2e5101512c12a21960.pdf 887d359f3aec09d217784853e1c25a74 PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19691219 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-12-19 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 7 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/049d7ef72c80d29b664cc343b31288aa.pdf f6222d897ad93e7128f9045e87282dcc PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19700126 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970-01-26 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 8 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/46a8c3c99e83fe3a002e9f8ec1abb1fe.pdf 1c6e08ca6579861cb439ec8918ac49d6 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19700206 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970-02-06 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 1 No. 9 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/756a3e2fe7733517cca610bbb44ded97.pdf 252831af42b1dc11ab9892acff1606a4 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19710924 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-09-24 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 2 No. 1 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9895b57fafd3a2fc6cd65304a3edfe56.pdf 501ad8b6069c05cce656e878245479af PDF Text Text � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19711015 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-10-15 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 2 No. 3 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b266bace18b39c51917d9ca098405390.pdf b26a6bde5f3a55cb3f4f38d10e168b70 PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19720310 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-03-10 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 3 No. 10 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ce632fe25b9383058a8e1201320f118b.pdf 3fdf515214ae729ad8f014baaac3a393 PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19720330 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-03-30 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 3 No. 11 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5996557708173e4fb043ef7773645fc2.pdf 43c250597fe08cdc89efb562976d8f7a PDF Text Text ��� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19720519 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-05-19 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 3 No. 13 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6d87a9b7fde99313f104a2445bb49e59.pdf 029dc98f45e0862e93e7839ba422a1e3 PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19711223 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-12-23 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 3 No. 6 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ef11d38840cf4897235157681e74fd5e.pdf f6c4d51ecb1ef084f46bb171cfc8626d PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19720120 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-01-20 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 3 No. 7 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d4bbb529c294837630df367a830f6caf.pdf db680d208997cc2df64cdfb3cd89b8ac PDF Text Text ��� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Summers in Saugatuck-Douglas Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. Kutsche Office of Local History Description An account of the resource Collection contains images and documents digitized and collected through the project "Stories of Summer," supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant. The collection aims to document the twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan, as they transformed through the state's bustling tourism industry and acceptance of minorities. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1910s-2010s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/">Copyright Undetermined</a> Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Douglas (Mich.) Michigan, Lake Allegan County (Mich.) Beaches Sand dunes Outdoor recreation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries. Allendale, Michigan Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Saugatuck-Douglas History Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Stories of Summer (Common Heritage project) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Text Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-07_SD-Tomahawk_19720211 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Saugatuck High School Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-02-11 Title A name given to the resource Tomahawk, Vol. 3 No. 9 Description An account of the resource Tomahawk was the student newspaper of Sagutuck High School. It contains editorials, stories, poems, and information about extracurricular clubs and events. Subject The topic of the resource Michigan Saugatuck (Mich.) Student newspapers and periodicals Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Digital file collected by the Kutsche Office of Local History from the Saugatuck Douglas History Center for the Stories of Summer project. Relation A related resource Stories of Summer (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/603a4d8f3ec195bd8c0dd0de6f00844f.jpg aad46e15bb3b38c66369238a42f9afaa Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Faces of Grand Valley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource University Communications Description An account of the resource A non-comprehensive collection of photographs of Grand Valley faculty, staff, administrators, board members, friends, and alumni. Photos collected by University Communications for use in promotion and information sharing about Grand Valley with the wider community. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1960s - 1990s Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived GV012-03. University Communications. Vita Files Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copryight Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University College administrators College teachers Colleges and universities -- Faculty Michigan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. Special Collections and University Archives Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV012-03 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Language A language of the resource eng Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context TomlinsonSuzanne Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. University Communications Title A name given to the resource Tomlinson, Suzanne Description An account of the resource Suzanne Tomlinson, Medicine Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University – History College teachers Universities and colleges – Faculty Michigan Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University Communications. Vita Files, 1968-2016 (GV012-03) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. Special Collections and University Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7422c34734b228b6c3ab57308dfb987c.jpg da4499b5b2d662cde1c62388ac94865c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Grand Valley State University Photographs Subject The topic of the resource Aerial photographs Universities and colleges Michigan Grand Rapids (Mich.) Allendale (Mich.) Building Facilities Dormitories Students Events 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Description An account of the resource People, places, and events of Grand Valley State University from its founding in 1960 as a 4-year college in western Michigan. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource News & Information Services. University Communications Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/41">News &amp; Information Services. University Photographs. (GV012-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-03-03 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-NC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted</a> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpg Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV012-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1960s-2000s Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Local Subject Subject headings specific to a particular image collection 1970s Source <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/41">University photographs, GV012-01</a> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV012-01_UAPhotos_000275 Title A name given to the resource Tommy Remengesau in fieldhouse Description An account of the resource Former student Tommy Remengesau served as President of Palau from 2001-2009 Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Allendale (Mich.) Universities and colleges Students Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-NC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives black and white photo https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9f93959232c9239f687da945642eb3d0.mp4 8dcb887970d80a6f09663566a31cb153 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/244a66aae546c6ad42d2c4cf416c5d83.pdf 204ccd25648ecd1c99bf71b94f408ea2 PDF Text Text Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Vietnam War / Cold War Alan Toms 2 Interview Length: (01:41:34:00) Vietnam Deployment (00:00:39:00)  While Toms was in the Ia Drang Valley, the operation he was a part off lasted for about two months and during that time, Tom’s flew aboard a helicopter gunship (00:00:39:00) o The gunship was a “B” Model Huey helicopter mounted with six machine guns and fourteen rockets; using the weaponry, Toms’ helicopter provided support and performed reconnaissance by fire (00:00:52:00) o In the center of the Ia Drang Valley was the city of Pleiku but the majority of the fighting occurred around the valley (00:01:12:00) o Because his helicopter was providing support, Toms was only on the ground a couple of times, whenever the helicopter had to land (00:01:48:00)  One time, the helicopter was waiting on the ground to receive a mission, which was quite typical and there were a large number of body bags about fifty to one hundred and fifty yards away from where the helicopter sat; Toms inquired what was going on and someone told him that those where infantry who had been hit but did not make it and were waiting to be airvaced out (00:01:58:00)  Toms did not want to get any closer to the bodies because he already had enough things to worry about (00:02:42:00)  Toms was aware that there were infantry in his own unit who were missing but he did inquire too much about them; he just packed up his things while other people came in to replace the missing soldiers (00:03:02:00)  Toms’ helicopter tended to be fifty to one hundred yards off the ground and he could see quite well what was going on, hoping that the helicopter would not take any fire (00:03:28:00)  If the helicopter ever did go down, it would be in the middle of a denselyjungled area, without a settlement nearby to walk to, and Toms was sure that either the Viet Cong or NVA would show up quickly (00:03:38:00) o Toms worked as a door gunner, firing an M-60 machine gun on one side of the helicopter while the helicopter crew chief operated the M-60 on the other side of the helicopter (00:04:35:00)  Every member of the crew wore helmets fitted with communication equipment so Toms could hear everything that the pilot and co-pilot were saying and vice versa (00:04:51:00)  Toms knew about what was going on as much as anyone in the helicopter, which was really good (00:05:01:00) o The crew usually did not use any of the rockets unless there was an actual hard target (00:05:19:00) �  o During reconnaissance by fire missions, the crew would fire the machine guns into wooded or jungle areas, with the objective to flush out whoever was hiding in the woods or suppress them so that the unit could land infantry and allow the infantry to maneuver (00:05:29:00)  As far as he could tell, Toms’ helicopter did not receive any return fire from enemy units on the ground (00:05:57:00) o One time, the helicopter was flying in an area with a suspected enemy presence, there was a person riding a bike and Toms received the order to put so fire on him (00:06:06:00)  The bike was leaned against a tree, so Toms shot several rounds into the tree as the helicopter passed by (00:06:28:00) o Once, the helicopter landed and there were two Viet Cong who had been taken captive sitting there but the two only looked ten years old, sitting in their black pajamas; Toms considered it kind of pathetic that the enemy looked like kids but it was such a big event to capture them (00:07:08:00)  The two Viet Cong looked as though they had not eaten anything in several days and were afraid of what was going to happen to them; the soldiers who were there were knocking to two captives around, roughing them up (00:07:35:00)  Based on the two captives, Toms assumed enemy should not have been too formidable but the enemy were more formidable than they looked; they had a cause to fight for and they fought as a team (00:08:01:00)  The enemy did not need to look the role of soldier to be effective; all they needed were decent weapons and the correct mindset to be dangerous (00:08:23:00) o The Ia Drang was heavily forested and in the open areas was elephant grass, which was tall grass that could grow taller than a soldier’s head (00:08:55:00)  If someone was laying down on the ground, Toms could not see him unless the person really presented himself (00:09:21:00) Toms had several friends from Fort Benning who in the infantry section of the 7th Cav. and they would often stop to see Toms (00:09:43:00) o When they stopped by, Toms knew that the soldiers had changed, including how they dressed and the way they talked (00:10:06:00)  The soldiers told stories about shooting enemies with their pistol who had crawl up close to the soldiers at night (00:10:19:00)  Toms was somewhat relaxed about the situation because he was in the air but the soldiers on the ground were in the middle of the fighting and Toms could tell they were shook up about what happened; looking into the soldiers’ faces, Toms could tell that they were much older than when he had talked with them only a couple of months before (00:10:52:00) The only real time the any attacked near where Toms was based was the attack on the platoon atop Hong Kong mountain (00:11:55:00) o One night, there was a lot of fire atop Hong Kong mountain and the soldiers stationed on the top of the mountain had to beat back an attack by the Viet Cong (00:12:15:00) �  o The attack was a big deal the next day because it was at night and the fighting was visible on the ground; the soldiers below the mountain could see the tracers and hear the sounds of battle quite clearly (00:12:30:00) o The enemy never tried to mortar Toms’ base camp, although Toms does not understand why; his and the other units were in a fixed position, just sitting in a big circle (00:12:46:00) According to Toms, he was not afraid when he would ride in the helicopter; he had gone through Airborne training, including jumping out of airplanes, and that was more unnerving than flying in a helicopter (00:13:20:00) o Toms rationalized it that once the helicopter took off, there was nothing he could do and he was just going to be there (00:13:35:00) o During flights, Toms was continuously searching for targets of opportunity that appeared and would be worth shooting at but most of the time, Toms was figuring what he was going to do and had his equipment on his body in case the helicopter did go down (00:13:45:00)  Apart from his .45 pistol, if the helicopter crashed, Toms planned to grab an M-16 rifle in the floor; he kept his canteen full and carried a couple of candy bars for food (00:14:09:00)  Toms knew that if the helicopter went down, his first move was getting away from the helicopter as quick as possible before preparing to defend the other members of the crew, depending on their condition (00:14:26:00)  During flights, Toms wore a safety belt attached to the floor so he would not fly out in case the helicopter dipped and he learned how to get out of the belt quickly so in the case of a crash, he could be off the helicopter quickly with all his equipment with him (00:14:50:00)  Toms had other parts of the plan, including keeping his flight helmet on instead of reaching for his other helmet because there would not be time (00:15:16:00) o Toms never had to put his plan into action because the only time the helicopter went down was when the hydraulics failed (00:15:30:00)  The helicopter was not in a hot area, so there was no danger from the enemy; the biggest danger was getting the helicopter down without crashing and the pilot did an excellent job of that (00:15:52:00) After fighting in the Ia Drang Valley, Toms’ unit moved to the coast, around the town of Bong Son, although Toms’ helicopter continued their missions of providing covering and suppressing fire of infantry on the ground (00:16:28:00) o The only major incident that Toms remembers from around Bong Son was when on the unit’s jeeps hit a mine (00:16:57:00)  Because Toms’ helicopter was not that far away, the pilot said they were going to fly over and take a look (00:17:28:00)  Toms had an image in his mind of what the wrecked jeep was going to look like but when the helicopter arrived, there was just a big black circle with a tire laying nearby (00:17:35:00) �   What ever the jeep hit must have been pretty big because although the helicopter crew looked and looked, all they could find of the jeep was that single tire (00:18:06:00) o The coastal area was just as dangerous as being in the Ia Drang Valley, although the beach looked like any one would find in Florida (00:18:35:00)  The entire area composed of rice paddies and was heavily farmed, including growing tapioca rice (00:19:04:00)  Once, two helicopters flew out and landed in the middle of some rice paddies, where curious farmers gathered around them; however, Toms did not like the situations because if any of the farmers were carrying anything, they could blow the helicopter away (00:19:24:00)  Toms knew he was in the third world because at one point, a five year old walked up and was smoking a cigarette (00:19:54:00)  The Vietnamese stayed around the two helicopters, who ended up spending the night in the rice paddy (00:20:30:00) o As far as Toms was concerned, he could not trust any of them, so the crews rotated guard duties and Toms remembers that when he was on guard duty, it was terrifying because they were so vulnerable (00:20:46:00)  Toms was glad when it became light and the helicopters were able to take off and get out of there (00:21:38:00)  Although nothing happened during the night, had Toms been the VC, it would have been a excellent opportunity to destroy two helicopters that were just sitting there (00:21:54:00) There were civilian Vietnamese workers on the base where Toms was stationed but they were always supervised, although Toms does not know by whom (00:22:16:00) o There were hundreds of civilians working on different construction projects on the base (00:22:29:00) During some nights, Toms wished he had brought his long underwear because during the rainy season, the soldier’s clothes got so wet that it was hard to keep warm, especially during the night (00:22:48:00) o During the rainy season, Toms was stationed at An Khe and the rainy season tended to overlap with winter and the Christmas season; it did not get cold enough that Toms needed to constantly wear a field jacket unless he was standing guard duty but it was still cold (00:23:09:00) o It did not rain all the time, just in the afternoon and at night, which was a difficult period to try and dry things out (00:23:29:00) o Both the jungle and the type of ground helped to maintain a relatively even temperature during both night and day; it was cold but not too cold and the main problem was being wet (00:23:52:00) o Because the soldiers in Toms unit were some of the first regular American soldiers in Vietnam, they had regular Army fatigues and combat boots, not the necessary jungle fatigues and jungle boots (00:24:11:00)  The uniforms did not rot off the soldiers as happened later because Toms and the others were smart enough to rotate their clothes (00:24:24:00) �  Toms spent a full twelve-month tour in Vietnam and within those twelve months, there was some turnover of soldiers within the unit; towards the end of Toms’ tour was when the worse soldiers were arriving in Vietnam (00:24:52:00) o Just as Toms was leaving was when the drug use in Vietnam began increasing; apart from drugs, there were also isolated incidents of fragging officers in the division that Toms heard about (00:25:07:00) o There were some real troublemakers that came into the 9th Cav. and although Toms knew the soldiers he served with were good, he was not so sure about the new soldiers, so as new ones came in, Toms was glad to be leaving (00:25:45:00)  Toms was on the first soldiers to leave the unit and when he received letters from his friends still in the unit, the friends would write about how the new soldiers caused problems and did not fit in (00:26:01:00)  Although the new soldiers had to go through their AIT, the Air Cav. was a home for soldiers whose MOS did not translate to combat in Vietnam, such as Toms having an armored MOS (00:26:52:00)  Nevertheless, it was not difficult to pick up the job or learn the weapons (00:27:28:00)  The new soldiers simply did not have a military background, unlike Toms, who had been in the military for roughly three years before he deployed to Vietnam (00:27:43:00)  There were some draftees who had a college education and Toms found plenty of people who he could converse with and learn from (00:28:21:00) During Toms’ tour, the Army offered several different R&R locations, including: Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Hawaii (00:29:27:00) o However, Toms viewed the far-off R&R locations as a waste because the military paid to transport the soldiers there (00:29:47:00) o When Toms received his own R&R, he had the option of going to Vung Tau, with was a costal resort near Saigon; Toms agreed and received at three-day R&R pass (00:30:08:00) o Toms went to Vung Tau and the resort had some of the most beautiful beaches that Toms had ever seen (00:30:45:00)  While Toms was at Vung Tau, it did not feel like there was a war going on (00:31:09:00)  Toms met some other soldiers who were also on R&R in Vung Tau; all the other men were single, like Toms, so they picked up some women and went to the beach to hang out (00:31:40:00) o Later, Toms put in for a more extended leave and was able to travel to Hong Kong with another soldier in his unit (00:32:27:00)  The other soldier was an African-American from Denver and was well educated (00:32:34:00)  When Toms and the other soldier went to Hong Kong, they ran out of all their money, so Toms called his father in Grand Rapids, asking his father to send six hundred dollars from Toms’ bank account and Toms’ father said okay, asking what part of Hong Kong Toms was in (00:32:56:00) �    Toms’ father wired the money and Toms gave some to the other soldier, with the other soldier saying he would pay Toms back (00:33:18:00)  Toms and the other soldier had a wonderful time in Hong Kong, including going on a tour and going onto mainland China [in the British part]with some girls to visit both the English New Territories and a Buddhist monastery (00:33:28:00)  After Toms had left Vietnam and was back in Michigan, he received a letter from the other soldier with the money Toms had loaned to him in Hong Kong (00:34:07:00) When Toms’ troop transport landed in Vietnam, there were thousands of soldiers aboard and if they all had the same rotation date, then they were all going to leave Vietnam on the same day (00:34:33:00) o Therefore, some of the soldiers left early and some left late, with Toms leaving early (00:34:42:00)  However, none of the soldiers knew whether they were going to be leaving early or later and there was no sense in asking any of higher-ups because they did not know either (00:34:49:00)  A soldier would usually receive two or three days of advance notice before he was supposed to ship home (00:35:24:00) Toms gambled his entire time in Vietnam, never lost, and won a total of $1700, apart from the $210 he made every month (00:35:34:00) o Toms kept the money in his duffel bag because there was not a bank nearby but he was terrified that at some point, someone would cut open the duffel bag and take his money because everyone knew he had the money (00:35:43:00) o There were card games that Toms was involved in and even played against the company commander (00:35:58:00) o The day before Toms left, another soldier want to flip quarters with Toms; Toms promised he would not lose and ended up taking a lot of money from the soldier (00:36:11:00) During his journey out of Vietnam, Toms first flew from his unit’s base to Pleiku, where a C-141 flew him back to the United States (00:36:25:00) o However, while Toms and two hundred other soldiers were waiting on the tarmac to board the plane, they were all told to dump their ammo and duffel bags on the tarmac (00:36:37:00)  All the soldiers dumped out their bags and officers came through to check and make sure the soldiers were not taking anything illegal or contraband back to the United States (00:36:58:00)  Toms had nothing because after a year, he did not want to get in trouble but just get on the C-141 and lift off (00:37:15:00) o After the soldiers repacked their bags, they boarded the C-141, which flew first to Japan then to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines; eventually, the plane arrived at Travis Air Force Base just outside San Francisco (00:37:27:00) o Toms was dressed in his military uniform when he walked through the airport in 1966 and nobody said anything to him (00:37:52:00) �  o Once at Travis, Toms got himself a taxi and a hotel room, where he stayed for two days, going to different night clubs and meeting another Army soldier and his wife who took Toms all around the city (00:38:31:00) o Toms eventually flew back to Michigan for a ten-day leave (00:39:12:00) When he returned to the United States, Toms had to re-enlist in order to attend OCS, so he now had a six-year commitment, with four and a half years remaining (00:39:35:00) o Toms knew he was going to have to stay in the military but he was kind of worried because he was still an E-5 with little prospect for promotion, which tended to come slowly (00:39:48:00)  However, because Toms had been in armor when the war started, promotions were coming fast to armor soldiers but he did not know about that because he was only an E-5 (00:40:06:00) o When Toms arrived at his new assignment at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he was told that he needed to go in front of the promotion board for a promotion to an E6 and after he went in front of the board, Toms knew he was going to get a promotion (00:40:20:00)  Toms did receive his promotion to E-6 and did extremely well in front of the promotion board because he had gotten soldier-of-the-month so many times in Germany (00:40:41:00)  Eventually, Toms heard that the Army needed men to attend drill sergeant school at Fort McClellan, Alabama and Toms decided to go (00:40:57:00) o Toms went down to Fort McClellan with about eighty other soldiers, with the top 10% percent being honor graduates and Toms managed to graduate sixth in his class (00:41:13:00)  While at Fort McClellan, Toms and the other soldiers learned how to teach basic training, including memorizing the drill and ceremony manual wordfor-word because they had to teach exactly how the manual said to teach (00:41:31:00)  The soldiers also covered all the subjects that were taught in basic training, including physical training and how to teach it, rifle training, protective masks, infiltration courses, and Army manuals (00:41:55:00) After finishing the training at Fort McClellan, Toms went back to join a basic training battalion at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was given the job of being a platoon sergeant (00:42:30:00) o As the platoon sergeant, Toms had two other E-6s as assistants and was assigned the task of teaching the sixty soldiers his platoon received from the base’s reception center (00:42:42:00) o When Toms arrived at the training battalion, there were a couple of other sergeants but only one opening as a platoon sergeant, so the officers asked if any of the sergeants wanted to take the position (00:43:28:00)  However, since Toms had the lowest rank, he did not say anything; nevertheless, the other sergeants said to let Toms do the job and the person who was asking asked Toms if he want to do the job, who said it was okay with him (00:43:45:00) � o The platoon sergeant position carried a lot of responsibilities, such as getting sixty men to follow Toms’ directions and if it did not go well, then he would be called to account (00:44:16:00)  Toms’ tasks were distributing jobs to his two assistants and running the sixty-man platoon; however, running the platoon was easy because Toms had been to drill sergeant school and the men had not (00:44:37:00) o Most of the men in the platoon were college graduates and fantastic athletes, with several gaining maximum scores on the PT tests (00:44:53:00)  The distribution of the soldiers was roughly half enlistees and half draftees; overall, the men had good attitudes, although there were a couple of troublemakers but not what Toms would categorize as bad troublemakers (00:45:04:00) o Toms had been in a fraternity while at Western Michigan University and he felt the fraternity overdid it in trying to be mean to new members and making it clear that the new members were under the charge of the fraternity, doing things that Toms believed were unnecessary (00:45:50:00)  When Toms was a low-ranking member of the military, a lot of similar things happened, which caused Toms to vow that those things were not going to happen if he ever made rank (00:46:12:00)  There was so much swearing in the Army that the swearing became insignificant to Toms; when Toms used the same vocabulary towards the men in the platoon, it shocked them but managed to get their attention (00:46:28:00)  Apart from a couple of vivid incidents, Toms did not directly mess with any of the men in the platoon; instead, he would either curse at them until they came around or shame them (00:46:49:00)  Vietnam was going on and most of the men in the platoon were probably going there, so Toms would say that if someone messed up in training, imagine what it would bee like when the fighting was real (00:47:12:00)  Because Toms lived in the barracks, the soldiers saw that it was not a part-time role for Toms because even he would be spitshining his boots (00:47:40:00) Toms held the drill sergeant position for two years, through 1968 (00:48:11:00) o During this time, attitudes in the United States changed and there became more protests, which Toms read about in the newspaper (00:48:33:00) o Toms himself was in favor of the war simply because before the war, he was watching the spread of communism through Europe as well as both Central and South America and on college campuses in the United States (00:48:45:00)  Toms was considered somewhat liberal in the military but he did not know anyone in the military who thought differently than Toms (00:49:32:00)  In terms of the recruits, they did not become more military; the recruits learned to suppress their believes because they knew that they were not going anywhere and their lives would be a lot hard if they made the drill sergeants mad (00:50:00:00) �o While he was a drill sergeant, Toms did not expect to be sent back to Vietnam because the Army was large enough that there were enough replacements; not even all the drill sergeants were Vietnam veterans at this point (00:50:50:00)  As it turned out, Toms received orders for Germany and he figured that by the time his tour in Germany was over, the war in Vietnam would be over as well (00:51:08:00) Second Germany Deployment (00:51:21:00)  Toms eventually deployed to Bad Herzfeld, Germany, which was near the East German border and was supposed to be the first line of defense against the East German and Russian armies (00:51:21:00) o The base at Bad Herzfeld was about twenty kilometers from the East German border and soldiers often went on patrols into the “five kilometer zone”; no American soldiers were allowed into the zone except for the soldiers assigned to the patrols (00:51:40:00) o Initially, Toms was part of “I” Troop, 14th Cavalry, which was headquartered in an area where Russian and Warsaw Pact forces were expected to mass their troops for an attack (00:52:01:00)  However, the unit’s designation changed to the 11th Cavalry, known as the Black Horse Cavalry for a black horse on the unit’s patch (00:53:01:00) o Toms’ platoon had an infantry section, an armored section of three tanks that Toms was a member of, and a scout section with two M-114s, where the platoon sergeant rode whenever the platoon went into the field (00:53:23:00)  Whenever the platoon went into the field, the armored section would just follow along because they did not have a specific mission (00:53:55:00)  The M-114s were small armored vehicles that appeared as a chopped down version of an M-113, which the infantry squads rode in (00:54:14:00)  Eventually, Toms suggested to the platoon sergeant that he be put into an M-113 to be the point man and another person could run the armored section (00:54:38:00) o The new job was more exciting because Toms was in front and could make initial contact with the enemy (00:54:55:00)  However, whenever the unit went to tank gunnery, Toms rejoined his tank (00:55:21:00)  The tanks in the armored section were M-60s (00:55:28:00) o The base where Toms was stationed was just on the outskirts of Bad Herzfeld itself (00:55:41:00)  The base was and old German Army base from World War II and as Toms suspects, all the way back to World War I, based on the barracks where the soldiers slept (00:55:55:00)  The soldiers could walk out of the base, go down and hill, and be in Bad Herzfeld (00:56:12:00)  On the next hill over was a West German Army post that Toms went to on several occasions to compete in athletic events (00:56:19:00) �     A lot of Germans worked on the base and when Toms’ barracks were being re-modeled, Toms was allowed to live off-base, so he found an apartment in the town (00:56:39:00) o The soldiers on the base were able to go into the town and visit restaurants (00:56:59:00) o There was an NCO club on the base, which was really nice and often had a live band (00:57:03:00) Toms took a lot of trips from the base, including to Amsterdam, but he eventually started taking his car to Hamburg (00:57:42:00) o While vacationing in Hamburg, Toms meet a German girl, the couple dated and eventually married (00:57:50:00)  Before Toms and his wife married, the base chaplain advised the couple not to marry in Germany because of the Armed Forces agreement, which said a soldier could not marry a German girl; if they married in Germany, Toms’ wife would become a dependent and the U.S. government would have to pay for her, something they did not want to do (00:58:01:00)  Instead, the chaplain advised the couple to go to Switzerland, which they did, and they married in Basel, Switzerland (00:58:12:00)  After marrying in Switzerland, Toms and his wife returned to Hamburg, where they had a marriage ceremony at a church (00:58:20:00) Toms was stationed at Bad Herzfeld for his entire three-year deployment (00:58:46:00) While Toms was deployed in Germany, he and the other soldiers were aware of the activities of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, an anti-American terrorist group (00:59:06:00) o As well, it was the 1960’s and both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were playing in Frankfurt but Toms did not see them (00:59:12:00) o There was a newspaper called the “Overseas Weekly” and Toms knew some of the reporters, who were radical friends of his wife (00:59:51:00)  One time, the reporters came to Bad Herzfeld to do a story, came to the headquarters and asked for Toms; the request shook everyone on the post up because the newspaper went all over Europe each week (01:00:13:00)  Toms did go with the reporters to the border and although parts of the story ended up in the newspaper, it was not the big thing that everybody feared it would be (01:00:37:00)  Toms visited the reporters’ apartment in Frankfurt and they had a lot of radical literature, were using drugs, and Toms being a soldier and associating with them was risky (01:00:54:00)  Whenever he was with the reporters and their radical friends, Toms just had to be careful about what he did (01:01:52:00) o On the whole, the German population were not hostile towards the soldiers; the Germans were rapidly recovering from the end of World War II (01:02:03:00) There was always the fear that the Soviets would attack, especially because things were going bad for them at the time; either the Soviets were going to have to attack soon or give up, so the soldiers were always ready and expecting things to happen (01:02:35:00) o The soldiers knew that the Soviet economy was going bad (01:03:08:00) o During one of the Arab-Israeli wars, the Soviets supplied the Arab nations with T62 tanks; during tank gunnery, Toms was able to go through a captured T-62 tanks and he never saw anything so primitive (01:03:16:00) � The tank was armed with a huge, 155 mm gun but the tank itself was not really something Soviet soldiers could fight out of; it was basically a platform for the huge gun and a couple of machine guns (01:03:51:00)  A lot of the interior of the tank was made of wood while even the tanks Toms first started out with, the M-48s, did not have wood (01:04:12:00)  Toms actually felt sorry for the Soviet soldiers because that was supposed to be their best tank (01:04:26:00) o Toms also did a lot of reading and knew that the Soviets were having a lot of problems that increased as times went on (01:04:36:00) o As well, the difference in the standard of living between the recovering East and West Germany became more apparent, although Toms did not fully see it until he later received an assignment in Berlin (01:05:01:00)  While in Berlin, Toms was able to go into East Berlin and see how things really were there (01:05:12:00)  After seeing the differences between the East and West, Toms became less worried about the Soviets because they did not have the capabilities to fully defeat the western nations (01:05:30:00) Return to the United States (01:05:38:00)  Toms finished his deployment at Bad Herzfeld in 1970, when he received orders to go back to Fort Knox and be a drill sergeant (01:05:38:00) o The people who Toms was training now had already completed basic training and were coming to the training battalion for armored training (01:05:55:00) o During the eight-week course, Toms and others taught the recruits about how to drive a tank, tank communication, and tank gunnery (01:06:07:00) o When Toms returned to the United States, his wife came with him and she began going to school; although she had the high school equivalent in Germany, it was not recognized in the United States, so she had travel twenty miles to the south of Fort Knox to get her GED (01:06:30:00)  Later on, after she completed her GED, Toms’ wife went to college and eventually received a Master’s Degree (01:06:55:00)  Toms’ wife had already been married to an American and had son by that man who was four when Toms married his mother; the son did not speak English, so he and Toms spoke in German until they moved back to the United States and the son began taking classes in English (01:07:06:00)  Toms’ wife did not have much problem adapting to living in the United States and did excelled in her GED studies; normally, it was one test per day but Toms’ wife took them all in a six-hour block (01:07:34:00)  Toms’ wife then began taking courses to being her college studies and in one of the courses in logic was Toms’ company commander, who worked with Toms’ wife on some of the work because she had a more open mind (01:08:04:00)  The recruits who Toms was training now had been through the eight weeks of basic training and were less intimidated because they knew the drill sergeants’ tricks; Toms and the other drill sergeants had to treat the recruits more like men (01:09:02:00) � o On the weekends, the recruits were usually free to leave the base, whereas in basic training, the recruits were confined to their barracks for six weeks unless they marched to the PX (01:09:15:00) o There were not a lot of troublemakers amongst the recruits and although the Vietnam War was beginning to die down, the recruits knew that they would be joining an armored unit somewhere (01:09:48:00)  There were a few incidents where Toms had to use his rank to scare someone into doing what needed to be done (01:10:03:00)  The armored forces were usually dedicated to fighting in Europe; even armored units stateside were nothing like the forces in Europe, where there were thousands of soldiers living on huge bases (01:10:35:00) Toms stayed at Fort Knox for two years before he applied to go to the “bootstrap program”, which was a program that if Toms received a letter from a university saying he could completed a program within eighteen months, the Army would send Toms and his family to that university (01:11:27:00) o Toms went back to Western Michigan University and completed his degree program in eighteen months, with his lowest grade being a “B+” (01:12:03:00) o Toms’ wife also started attending the university and completed a full, four-year degree in two years, minus two courses (01:12:20:00) o Toms could not take just the courses in his degree program because he had been out of school for so long and some of his credits were no longer recognized; Toms ended up taking graduate-level courses for some of his credits because he already had certain courses (01:12:45:00)  Toms took one course with a professor who had given him a “D” when Toms first attended the university and Toms was determined to get a better grade than the professor, which he did (01:13:26:00) o Before Toms got his degree, he had to do practice teaching and was assigned to Kalamazoo Central High School, which was rough (01:14:43:00)  Toms taught grades nine through twelve for five hours a day; the instructor told Toms that he was in charge and then Toms never saw the instructor again for the entire semester (01:14:52:00)  The kids Toms taught were worse than anyone he encountered as a drill instructor; however, being a drill instructor helped Toms during the teaching (01:15:10:00) o While at Western Michigan, Toms became involved with the university’s ROTC and attended several group functions with his wife; after he completed his degree, Toms was given the option of working with the ROTC program (01:15:27:00)  One night, Toms received a phone call from the Department of the Army asking if he had ever been to Berlin and when Toms said no, he was told they could give him a deployment there (01:15:45:00)  Toms went down to the ROTC the next day and said he would not be able to work for them because he had received an assignment to the Berlin Brigade (01:15:57:00) �Third Germany Deployment (01:16:14:00)  Toms’ assignment to the Berlin Brigade started off bad (01:16:14:00) o When Toms arrived at headquarters, he was told to join the 40th Armored but was also told that there was not a position open for him; however, the personnel at headquarters were lying because of another sergeant (01:16:18:00)  The other sergeant was an E-6 who had a year to go, was liked by the personnel at headquarters and was occupying Toms’ position, (01:16:27:00) o Explaining he had a Phys. Ed. degree, Toms asked if he could work recreation services because there was fantastic physical activity program for the soldiers; there was an opening in the section, so Toms worked there (01:16:39:00)  When he took the job, Toms was told he out-ranked the NCO in-charge of the program and was asked if that would be a problem, but it was not for Toms (01:17:34:00)  The main things Toms did apart from managing twenty-five civilian and military workers was work with the boxing team, being a judge for boxing matches and organizing various running teams (01:17:53:00)  Toms’ running teams competed against the British, French, and West Germans and won every time (01:19:04:00)  No soldier could serve in a unit in Berlin if he had any recent disciplinary action and a soldier could only serve in Berlin once (01:19:46:00) o Berlin was such a sought after assignment because it was right in the middle of everything that was going on; as well, the city was beautiful, both in historical beauty and in things to do (01:20:04:00)  The living conditions for the soldiers were like nothing else in the military and the soldiers were able to live there free (01:20:39:00)  Toms went into East Berlin with his wife and when they went, Toms had to be in uniform in order to get through Checkpoint Charlie (01:21:01:00) o Toms and his wife would spend the entire day in East Berlin and they needed to be out by a certain hour (01:21:11:00) o When they went over, Toms had to exchange his and his wife’s Western marks for Eastern marks at a rate of one to one; however, because the East Germany guards were unable to even touch or search Toms, he began exchanging his West German marks in West Berlin at a rate of nine to one (01:21:26:00)  Thereafter, when Toms and his wife went into East Berlin, they had all kinds of money (01:22:07:00)  Once, Toms and his wife went to a restaurant at the Alexander Platz hotel and ordered the best items on the menu, filet mignon and wine from Hungary, spending around 100 marks but because Toms exchanged marks at nine to one, price did not matter (01:22:45:00) o Toms remembers that at one point, there were five people waiting on his and wife’s table (01:23:02:00) o Despite what Toms and his wife were able to do, it was sad to see the plight of the people in East Berlin due to communism (01:24:13:00) �  East Berlin looked like it was from the 1920s with the exception of the hotel and massive television tour (01:24:26:00)  None of the buildings had been cleaned; a material would coat the walls of a building, making the walls dark and if the material was not sand-blasted or scrubbed away, then the walls just got darker and darker (01:24:38:00)  Toms and his wife would always see Russian soldiers in uniform; invariable, the soldiers would be short and dark-skinned, marking them as conscripts from the east (01:25:09:00) Toms extended his tour one year while in Berlin, making it so he spent four years total in the city, leaving in 1979 to go to the Virginia Military Institute to be an instructor in the ROTC department (01:25:41:00) End of Military Service / Post-Military Life / Reflections (01:26:01:00)  When Toms went to the Virginia Military Institute, he took over the ROTC department from another E-8 (01:26:01:00) o Toms and his family rented a house in the country and his children, his son and a daughter who had been born in Berlin began attending school (01:26:08:00) o With her degree, Toms’ wife was able to get a job at the local grade school and Toms began teaching in the ROTC department, specifically teaching freshmen and sophomores in armored subjects, such as tank driving, tank communications, and tank gunnery (01:26:20:00)  Meanwhile, the captain in the armored section taught tactics to the juniors and seniors (01:26:41:00)  There was a major in-charge of the department and every so often, he would teach one of Toms’ class, just to kept up to date (01:26:57:00) o During some of the classes, there were five tanks in a field and the cadets drove the tanks around the field (01:27:38:00)  The classes also went to a firing range at Fort A.P. Hill and at another base; the cadets could fire the co-axial machine gun but that was it, although they could simulate firing the main gun (01:28:09:00) o The cadets Toms taught were highly motivated; one cadet was the son of the Secretary of the Army (01:28:49:00)  Some of the cadets were marathon runners and Toms would talk with them about his experiences, including going to Washington D.C. and running in the Marine Corps marathon (01:29:04:00)  From the military institute, Toms went to Fort Lee, Virginia and processed out of the Army there; while Toms processed out, the Army tried talking him into claiming some type of disability although the only time Toms had been in the hospital was when he hurt his back taking a track off a tank (01:30:06:00)  Toms finally left the Army in 1981, having served twenty years (01:30:56:00)  After Toms got out of the Army, he and his family returned to Grand Rapids, where they purchased a house and Toms got a job working for the Kentwood School district as a supervisor to the custodians (01:31:05:00) o Toms stayed in the job for two years, working at three different schools, where half the employees cooperated with Toms and half did not (01:31:27:00) �  o After two and a half years, Toms began working with rental houses, tendered his resignation to the school district and began working fully with rental houses, which were more profitable (01:32:09:00) Over the twenty years that Toms was in the Army, the Army itself changed a lot, including the PT tests (01:34:02:00) o Toms himself is not a advocate for change unless the change improves things and in his opinion, the tests the Army had were good as they were (01:34:09:00) o The Army also changed the designation of people going through training, which Toms believes was a bad idea because the Army should not be giving titles to people who do not know anything yet (01:34:39:00) o During the 1960s and the Vietnam war, there was more of a laissez-faire attitude and Toms believes that the country did not survive that period; the country is a little to lax with their finances (01:35:17:00) o Toms feels that the Army today is very well equipped to complete the missions that they have assigned to them (01:36:39:00) When he came out of the Army, Toms feels that he was a lot more educated and was able to combine all the things he had learned in school with what he had read (01:39:24:00) o The instructors Toms had in college were good but the ones in the Army were just as equal (01:39:32:00) o Toms learned not to anticipate that something was always going to be good; something bad might happen and Toms needed to be ready (01:40:06:00)  When Toms was on the tank, he would be constantly thinking about what would happen if the tank was hit but an enemy RPG or tank (01:40:15:00) o Toms learned that he needed to maintain all his equipment, lest he be caught out in a time when he needed it (01:41:14:00) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Veterans History Project Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. History Department Description An account of the resource The Library of Congress established the Veterans History Project in 2001 to collect memories, accounts, and documents of U.S. war veterans from World War II and the Korean War, Vietnam War, and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to preserve these stories for future generations. The GVSU History Department interviews are part of this work-in-progress, and may contain videos and audio recordings, transcripts and interview outlines, and related documents and photographs. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1914- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Afghan War, 2001--Personal narratives, American Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979-1981--Personal narratives, American Korean War, 1950-1953--Personal narratives, American Michigan--History, Military Oral history Persian Gulf War, 1991--Personal narratives, American United States--History, Military United States. Air Force United States. Army United States. Navy Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Personal narratives, American World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James Boring, Frank Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource eng Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/455">Veterans History Project interviews (RHC-27)</a> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context TomsA2 Title A name given to the resource Toms, Alan (Interview outline and video, 2 of 2), 2011 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Toms, Alan Description An account of the resource After completing his tour in Vietnam with the Air Cavalry, Alan Toms returned to the United States, where he completed drill sergeant training before going to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. From Fort Campbell, Toms deployed for a second time to Germany, where he met a girl from Hamburg who he eventually married. Toms returned to the United States in 1970 with his wife and her son and went to Fort Knox, Kentucky to give more basic training. Eventually, the Army sent Toms back to Western Michigan University, where he finished his degree before deploying for a third time to Germany, to join the Berlin Brigade. Finally, when Toms returned to the United States, he went to the Virginia Military Institute's ROTC program before finally retiring from the military. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Kentwood Historic Preservation Commission (Kentwood, Mich.) WKTV WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States--History, Military Michigan--History, Military Veterans Video recordings United States. Army Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Personal narratives, American Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-03-10 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/455">Veterans History Project Collection, (RHC-27)</a> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/125eadc257caf9ab9f29c1d572a3384f.mp4 3d3897369c7e26fc95147b91cb45342b https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0f36d5d9f23f0c70d3d84ff4b3b08053.pdf 19fde60e59ff92179ac34418258312a4 PDF Text Text ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW ALAN TOMS – NO. I Interviewed by: James Smither PhD, GVSU Veterans History Project, Transcribed by: Joan Raymer, July 16, 2011 Interviewer: Now Alan can you start us off with a little bit of background on yourself and your family? I was born in Toronto Canada in 1939 and the earliest memories I have was when my mother would be packing up a box of clothes and other dry good items to send to Europe. It was known then as a care package and the thing that’s interesting about it is that my wife was the daughter of a German seaman in the German navy and was on the receiving end of these packages. 1:06 A lot of my relatives were in the service and they were all conscripted, and I don’t think any of them joined, to the best of my recollection. But, starting off, my grandfather was in the First World War, and he said that he remembers that he walked all the way across France during all those campaigns and part of the Canadian Army as an infantryman. Some of the other things he told me was his father served in the English Army, because he was born in England, Blackwell, and his father, part of the time, was stationed in Poona, India, right outside of Bombay, and won a medal for shooting, which my grandfather had passed on to me. 2:03 I’m supposed to pass it on to another relative of mine, hopefully, perhaps will serve in the military. He also mentioned the fact that his father fought in the Boer War, with the English, in South Africa, right around 1900 My other uncles were in the Canadian military, my uncle Bud was an ambulance driver in Holland and my uncle Les was in the Canadian Air Force, enlisted and served as a crew of the aircraft and he was a bombardier, and he said that he had been over most of the large cities in Germany. I thought about it and I didn’t think 1 �too much about it then, but I think about it now, because my uncle was quite a very timid man. 3:01 He must have been terrified--from the books that I’ve read of the things that went on when they were trying to be up there over those German cities. Interviewer: Then you mentioned that you remembered when one of your uncles came back from the war. My Uncle Bud came in his uniform and picked me up from school and I was in, just about, the first grade when the war was ending and it was quite a moving experience. Interviewer: You had—and that was his first—when he’d just got back? He’d got back, he’d just gotten back to Toronto, but I had another brother Denny and he just loved coming over to our house and doing things with us. So, it’s the first thing he did when he got out of the—when he came home. Interviewer: How was it then that you wound up in the U.S? My father, after the depression—he did find employment during the depression. 4:04 Then somehow, he got working with plants that made gears, and he somehow learned that trade and I really don’t know how, because I was five, six, or seven when he was getting established, and then I know he said one day that we were going to move to Woodstock and leave Toronto, which I really didn’t want to do it because I really liked where I was. We moved to Woodstock and he was working there at a place called Rollins Gears and he was a gear specialist. I guess he was self-trained, because he was a high school graduate and not any further, but we lived there in Woodstock for two years and then he said we were going to move to America and he had a sponsor and he had a job there that was lined up, and also related to the gear cutting industry. 5:03 So, we moved to urban Detroit and it was quite exciting, because we were dressed quite 2 �differently. I remember when we came to Detroit I had l had leather pants that came down to my knees and socks that came up to my knees also, and then some boots. I actually had a coat that had fur around it, around the head, the hood and that’s how I went to school. Interviewer: In the 70’s that would have been fashionable. Right, well I had to get—then I had a—the Canadian Maple Leafs had won the Stanley Cup and I had a big Maple Leafs sweater and, of course, I could never wear that anymore, because the very year I went there, the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup and they were going—they were hockey crazy in Detroit. I was from Canada, so I had to get out of those clothes and fit in, in the fourth grade. 6:00 Also, when I came, they thought I was smarter than what my grade showed, so they put me ahead a half a year, because I could multiply by three numbers and they couldn’t. But, then they found out I couldn’t write, because in Canada you print until the sixth grade and this was the fourth grade and so, then they put me back a whole year, which was embarrassing, so I lost a half a year, so I became the oldest kid in the class. So, I was the oldest kid in my class throughout my high school schooling. The thing was, in Canada you end up with better penmanship than you do in America. I have letters from Canada, from my mother and everything, and it’s a better system there so, but at the time I was quite embarrassed. Interviewer: Now, you eventually move on from Detroit though, while you’re growing up? Yeah, my dad was offered a better job at Continental Motors, which was in Muskegon at the time. 7:03 A very, very large plant, I think it was about a mile on each side and once again in the gear cutting industry, but they wanted him to work seven days a week , 3 �so after about six months he quit that job and found a job, while we were living in Muskegon, in Grand Rapids, at Lear, in gear cutting, in downtown Grand Rapids. Then we did move to Grand Rapids and he was once again involved in this gear industry, so I really moved around an awful lot, but looking back on it, it was really quite interesting. We always improved, every step of the way, my dad was getting better work all the time and I was getting older. 8:00 Now, when I look back it was quite an adventure. Interviewer: And he eventually sets up his own business too, doesn’t he? He started a gear manufacturing plant called Gear Research up on Taylor, which is up in Creston Heights and they were there about five years. A couple of interesting things there, I worked there when I was fourteen and I would take the bus down and work there in the afternoons, in the shipping department, boxing up gears. One thing that is kind of interesting is that one of our employees was Roger Chaffee, the astronaut. He was a student and I worked there over the summer and so did he. And he was a student in engineering at Purdue. His father worked for my dad too in the inspections department, Don Chaffee, and sometimes we would have too many gears to pack, so he would come out. 9:00 He was a student and he was working on the gear cutting machines, but he would come out in the shopping department and help me, because we were overloaded with stuff to ship. But they made gear assemblies for, I remember, Brunswick Pin Setters, which was based out of Muskegon, and made gears for Abrams Instruments, which was out of Lansing. There was always trouble, because that was Air Force related and those gears would come back rejected and there was always a lot of flak about that. We’d get the boxes back and it was a lot of trouble, because the ―so called military‖ 4 �establishment had tougher criteria than what my dad thought was necessary for these gears, so there was always a big problem there. Interviewer: Now, how was it you wound up in the army? 10:03 I was a student at Godwin High School and from there I went to Junior College in Grand Rapids, here and then I went to Western Michigan University and lived there in Vander Cook Hall, in the dorm and my grades were not very good and I was really more interested in having a lot of fun, and I joined a fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon, which I shouldn’t have done, learned the Greek alphabet and di a lot of other things like that. In general, I was going to sports events and my grades were not very good. They were not good enough to stay in school and that was rather embarrassing, so rather than embarrass my family any more, I joined the army. I’ll be on my own and I won’t be a problem for my family either anyway. 11:05 So, then I got in a little trouble with the law, minor in possession, doing a little drinking and creating a public disturbance. Anyway, I was interested in—I was in a lot of running events and a was a fair to middling runner, I was a long distance runner and I even ran in the Greek Week, I ran the mile for Tau Kappa Epsilon, and I placed fifth in the Greek Week activities. I played basketball for the fraternity and I liked doing things like that. I—throughout my life, work’s okay, but I work, so I can have a good time, that’s my object. Interviewer: Why did you pick the army? Well, I could get a guarantee in the army that I knew that they would honor, so I joined, because I wasn’t really interested in the navy, or the air force. 12:03 I thought that—I was an avid reader even then and it just appealed to me and I guess I read Leon Uris’s ―Battle Cry‖, Iwo Jima, and that’s why I guess I thought I’d probably be a lot better off in 5 �the army, but that was a mistake. The reason it was a mistake, my view from reading was nothing like what the real army is, in fact, a person that hasn’t really ever been in the army, which really amount to living outside twenty-four hours a day. It’s a lot different than what anybody could ever imagine. Reading will help a little bit, but the real thing is quite different. In 1961 I joined the army and I went to—down to Detroit. 13:00 And they said, ―You got a Canadian birth certificate and you don’t have any citizenship papers‖, so they sent me back to Grand Rapids to sit. I had to come back to Grand Rapids after being down there in Detroit, down on Jefferson Avenue at the induction center, and I had to go home and get my citizenship papers and then I went back and that’s when the adventure started. Interviewer: Where did you go for boot camp? We left there in a train and I went to Fort Knox and I was in basic there and after eight weeks, I got assigned to some other type of training, I didn’t know, and I really didn’t care, because like I said, I joined the army for fun, travel, and adventure and I really didn’t care what kind of job I got, because I had a guarantee I was going to go to Europe. 14:02 What capacity it was, it didn’t really matter to me, because I already had three years of college and I thought, ―This is going to be an adventure‖, and in the end it was. Interviewer: Now, tell me a little bit about the boot camp experience itself. How were they running the boot camp in 1961? Well, they’d stand you out there, I could tell you it was three in the morning, but it was probably about six, in the rain, and there would be a platoon sergeant standing in front of you and he would swear without letup. He could hardly see us, because it was pitch black, and we’d be standing there with our rifles and steel helmets on, and all ready to go 6 �to the range and he would tell us in so many words what would happen if we messed up marching to the range, which was a few miles, not five, or ten and it took us about an hour to walk there, march there, there is a difference. 15:00 Anyway, he cursed us up and down, didn’t know us, and like I said, I don’t think he did even see us. Anyway, there was just an awful lot of that and some of the guys in the formation were crying, standing out there crying. At the time you had the draft and those people. We were in Kentucky and there were people from--and people dragged out of those hills to be in the army, and from the Virginias and they didn’t want to be there, they just wanted to be home, and it was kind of sad. Anyway, we would go to the range and fire, and the army taught me how to fire. I had a shotgun at home and went out hunting, but never hit anything, but when I got in the army, they actually taught be how to shoot. We had a M1 rifle and a M-1 rifle has a clip that you push down, so when you hear now about different things happening in the United States and they say, ―Well, I had a thirty round clip‖, it doesn’t have a clip, it has a magazine. 16:01 A magazine comes up from the bottom and a clip is pushed down from the top, it’s not a thirty round clip. Anyway, a M1 has a seven round clip that you push down. They taught me how to fire and we went to the firing range for qualification and you had to get sixty, sixty hits on these targets that would pop up and it was very realistic. I did my best, because I was a fair to middling athlete, and I got fifty eight, so an ―expert‖ was sixty and above, and I fired ―marksman‖, which was fifty eight and that was okay, because as long as you try your best and I was satisfied with that. A lot of guys did fire ―expert’ though and it was quite authentic. Interviewer: How much did they do in terms of physical conditioning? 7 �Well, we had to take a PT test and I did well. There were five events and a hundred on each event was possible and you could get five hundred maximum. 17:03 I probably got four sixty, four seventy, I could always do that. Later on—that was one thing nice about the old army, they had the same test and later on I got four ninety nine, I only dropped one point in the grenade throw, but that was a tough test and to get a hundred points you had to run a mile in six minutes in fatigues and combat boots. You could have a t-shirt on, but to run a mile in six minutes with boots on—I did that later on when I was in my middle thirties and almost forty, I could do that. Interviewer: But, as someone who had been a distance runner and things like that, you were in reasonable condition when you went in. I was in excellent condition. Interviewer: How did yo do in terms of adjusting to the discipline in the army? Not very good, I don’t know, call it whining, or complaining, I wasn’t the best soldier. 18:01 But, they always knew that if they needed something done, if you needed somebody who could shoot, or run, or join a team, or be on time, or to be accountable, I was good at that. In those days you had guard duty, you had KP, on KP there were about six different jobs. The job that I quickly jumped right into was pots and pans, and the reason I did that was to avoid the wrath of the people who worked in the mess hall, because even the privates would be swearing at you, they wouldn’t hit you, but they would just get in your face, even though they were PFC’s, they were cooks and they would just be all over you, but all you had to do in pots and pans was keep those pots and pans clean, keep that soap hot and keep a lot of suds in there to break down the grease. 19:00 Then they would stay out of your face and off your back. You didn’t want to be 8 �the outside man, because you would have frozen to death outside washing garbage cans all day long. You didn’t want to be a DRO, dining room orderly, because they would just be all over you. You couldn’t put the salt and pepper shakers on those tables the right way, no matter how many different ways you did it, it was wrong and they would just be all over you all day long, just constant yelling. I was buried in suds with those big gloves up to my elbows, in peace, for the entire day, so it was a good idea, I guess. Interviewer: Now, were you older than most of the guys you were training with? Because I had already gone to college, I was twenty-two, and coming down there on the train they had a club car and everybody was drinking, but I have—and I like to drink, but I didn’t drink, because I didn’t want to go into basic with a big hangover. 20:00 Then when I was in the reception center, for a week at Fort Knox, and that’s where you take these tests, and these tests govern what kind of a job you get. By then I was starting to think that maybe I should start trying to do things right, so even though they were drinking and running around on the post, because there wasn’t much accountability when you’re in the reception center, so people, they would drink, and they would carouse, and things would go on all night long, and just raise hell in the barracks, but I got a good night's sleep before these tests. These tests were eight hours solid and what you come out of there is your—that test is a combination of math and English and what you come out of there with is your GT score, general technical, and you carry that with you the rest of your army career, and I got a hundred and twenty six, and that’s one of the highest scores they’d ever seen. 21:01 I never ran into anybody that had a higher score than that, but I had three years of college and I was sober and I was ready. I went into it with a good night's sleep and I got a great score. And so, they—I got offered jobs later on in the army 9 �and they always said, ―You have a high GT, Toms‖, you didn’t even have to prove, or just---or you didn’t even have to go in and act smart, they knew that just by looking at my paper work and that helped me. Interviewer: What kind of training, then, did you get after boot camp? After I hitchhiked home on Highway 31, which nobody used to go out there in uniform, on Highway 31 and hitchhike home for Christmas, which I immediately did. I hitch hiked all the way home and didn’t pay a cent, because I’m English and I’m cheap and that’s how I accumulate money and that’s why I have money. 22:00 Then when I came back they said, ―Don’t you bring a car to this post‖, and I brought my car to the post and I hid it on the other side of the post and on week-ends when I was in AIT, Advanced Individual Training, I would go over to the bus station and there would be two hundred guys trying to get to Louisville and I’d say, ―Anybody wants a ride to Louisville, give me a dollar‖, so I’d fill up my car with people and for five, or six dollars you could drink—I could drink for two days on five, or six dollars, because drafts were ten, or fifteen cents, maybe a quarter. Anyway, I reported there to that AIT and I saw these guys outside sitting in the snow, with their winter outfits on, and they were sorting brass. It was fifty caliber brass, links of brass, and I thought, ―Oh my God, I’m in tanks‖, and I thought, ―This is going to be bad‖. That’s what is was and they had M-48, M-60 tanks, and that was the training that I got, eight weeks of tank training. 23:00 Interviewer: Now, what does that consist of? Do you learn all of the jobs in the tank? You learn how to drive the tank, you learn—you have classes on tank communication, tank radios, and we fire the coaxial machine gun, that’s a machine gun that’s mounted on 10 �the tank and the main gun that’s 105mm and on the same access as that coaxial is a 30 caliber machine gun. You sit in the tank and you do fire that machine gun on the range. But, one thing was, we were at the firing range and we had no idea they were going to fire this main gun and we were just lolling around on the ground out behind this tank and what they were doing was, they were fore sighting this main gun, lining the sights up with the gun itself, and all of a sudden this tank fired and I was about fifteen feet behind it. 24:00 Well, it just about knocked me down, because there’s a big ball of fire three, or four meters across that comes out of the muzzle and it’s physical, because it will knock you, because the oxygen is burned out of the air and creates a vacuum and the air rushes in and makes this big sound, but it actually moves you. But anyway, I’ve never heard any sound that loud since, up to that time, or since then , I couldn’t believe anything could ever be that loud as when that tank fired, and the tank, of course, rocked back and moved back. It weighs fifty-two tons, but it moved back about three inches when that gun fires. These NCO’s, they knew what was going to happen and they just stood up. We didn’t have ear plugs, nothing and we got away from that, after that, but they thought that was great fun to scare us. I’d never heard anything like that in my life. Interviewer: Did you stay with the tanks, or did you find a way into something else? I stayed in tanks, because if you’re in a combat arm, you can make rank faster. 25:03 And after that training I went to—I went by bus to Fort Dix and I went to the Jib and saw Chubby Checker there live, we didn’t have any civilian clothes there—live. We were taken by bus after we were at the reception center there for about a week and what my main function there was to stay out of Hoff detail. They would have formations, but they didn’t know who we were. There would be thousands of people standing outside, me and 11 �some other people, we wouldn’t even go to the formation, because you knew at the end of the day, on the board, they would have a list of people who were shipping out, because from there you would go by bus to Brooklyn to get on the ship. 26:00 So, they would just keep you busy all day long, working in the mess hall, working in the barracks, so we would just go and stand behind the barracks somewhere with some other company, while our company was having formation. They’d take all these people out for detail and we’d appear and we’d go hide in the barracks and mess around the whole day until five o’clock came and you’d go and see if your name was on the list to ship. We just avoided detail. Anyway, finally my name was on the ship and you got your duffle bag and got on the bus. We went on the bus and went to Brooklyn, down to the docks, going all the way through Brooklyn, it was exciting. This was Brooklyn in 1961; actually it was 1962, because it was February. We got there and on the dock they had a band playing ―When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again‖ and it was really something, you know. Interviewer: A sendoff Yeah, it was something and the next band I heard was when I got on the ship going to Vietnam, a little bit different. 27:00 Anyway, we got on the ship, it was 1962, in February, and that was the year when they had enormous storms on the Atlantic and people were throwing up before we got away from the land. That ship, it took us usually seven days to cross, but it took us eight. I was in C compartment, and twenty-two hundred soldiers on there. Interviewer: Now, was this a troop transport? It was the Gordon, and the waves were seven stories high and they came at us just like enormous apartment buildings. When the bow would go down and you could look up 12 �and it was seven stories above the water. When the bow would go down, the whole ship shuttered. 28:00 This is a big ship, because the screw, the propeller came out of the water and then would go back down. No one was allowed out on the deck, because the waves were coming over the tail and over the bow of the ship. And I remember you go up a long way to get on that ship, up the gangplank and there was a lot of the ship above water until you got out there in that ocean. Anyway, I was on KP down there, but there wasn’t much KP, because everybody was sick and we were just sitting, but you still had to go to your job eight hours a day, but we’d just sit in the mess hall and if you could get up and do something--all the cooks were Filipinos and if you could get up and do some work, you did, but most of the guys sat along the wall throwing up and had these barf bags. People were in the chow line and the mess sergeant would go down there and say, ―Get that guy out of the chow line‖, people would be throwing up in the chow line, because you couldn’t keep anything down. Interviewer: Right 29:00 Anyway, they had salt water showers, there was no fresh water and after your shower you were all gummed up, but I showered, probably, a couple of times. Then there were a lot of gangs on the ship, tough guys, that wanted to fight, and I remember the guy I knew, a big guy, named Hicks, came in there looking for his hat and this guy that Rob was hanging around with, he was from Detroit and he was strong guy, and he started going through our lockers and this guy named Senna from Detroit said, ―Don’t open my locker‖. This was about a six foot four guy that looked like Cassius Clay in every way. The guy looked at Senna, Senna got off his bunk and said, ―Don’t open my locker‖ and the guy looked at him and didn’t open it and I thought you’re crazy Senna, because this 13 �guy will kill you, and I’ll probably get killed , because I’m only two feet away and can’t move. 30:00 See, there were five bunks in there and the lowest one was right on the floor and those bunks were only about a foot and a half and you had to slide into them. Once you’re in the bunk, there are five on top of each other. You slide in and you couldn’t turn over, you had to lie—the only way you could turn over was to slide out, turn over and slide back in, there were five f them. Anyway, I tripped that way all the way to Bremerhaven. Anyway, we got to Germany and I didn’t know that all of northern Europe was underwater too and there were a hundred and some people died in Hamburg and all the lowlands were flooded. All those countries, Belgium, northern Germany, Holland, they lost—thousands and thousands of people died in northern Europe during that storm. Interviewer: That storm you were in, you just kind of took the storm with you as you went across the Atlantic. Well, it was all going on at the same time. 31:00 We walk around now, in Europe, you’re in Hamburg, where the Elbe River came up so high there’s markers all over along that shore that shows where it came up in 1962. There are newspaper articles and all types of things. Anyway, my wife was there and she was on the water, because she lived on a house boat in Hamburg and it was quite exciting. We came into Bremerhaven and finally the water was calm, because we were going into the harbor. So, everybody got outside and it was February, so we had our coats on, overcoats, and at the very same time a great big Russian freighter came out with an enormous Hammer and Sickle on the stack. We gave that ship the finger and cursed, you should have heard the profanity and they were only about a hundred yards away. 32:04 We were just screaming and 14 �everybody was just so happy to be outside in some fresh air from being in that prison. Where my bunk was, it was three floors below the water line and no windows, there were no windows in there. We took the train from there and there were only two going—this very strong tough guy named Dan Senna, he and I were the only ones going to Baumholder and in tanks, in armor, Eleven Echo, that’s the MOS. Anyway, they said, the people on the ship said, ―You won’t like Baumholder, it’s the A-hole of Europe‖, and I said, ―Where are you going?‖ ―Going to Munich, going to Frankfort‖, we were the only ones going to Baumholder. Well anyway, Baumholder is a large post with ten thousand soldiers, the largest concentration of American troops, all combat arms, infantry, armor, artillery. 33:04 That’s where we ended, two of us and we ended up in B company 68th Armor. Interviewer: Was that part of a division? That was part of the 8th Infantry division and it was headquartered in Bad Kreuznach. This is over close to the French border not too far from Trier. Interviewer: Alright, and what duties did you have there? Well, I started off as a tank loader, the lowest thing, but it didn’t really matter, but after I was there about six months I started thinking about the fact that I didn’t always want to be a loader and I thought, ―Well, after this guy goes I’ll be the driver‖, and somebody else came into the unit and they made him the driver. I thought, ―I’m never going to get ahead here, I’m just going to be a dud‖, and it was really disheartening. There were some shifts around and I got stationed on this other guy's tank and he said, ―I want you to drive, Toms‖. 34:00 I said, ―Okay‖. I’d never driven much, a little bit around the motor pool anyway, so then a battlefield problem came up and I ended up—I drove that tank all the 15 �way across Germany, a battlefield problem in the winter and your head is sticking out and the cold air is just roaring in there. By the time I got to where we were going, which was Hohenfels, which is over close to the Czechoslovakian border. We were close to the French border and it took us, I think, three days to get there on the Autobahn and everything, but it was really a thrill, so I established myself as a tank driver. Then the tank gunner came around and he said, ―You’re going to have to be the gunner Toms‖, and I thought, ―I’m a PFC, and all of a sudden I’m the driver, that’s an E4 position, I’m the gunner, that’s an E5 position, and I’m a PFC‖. 35:00 I was a PFC for over two years. I had two years in grade before I made spec four, and part of the problem was that I had two article fifteens, which is non-judicial punishment. I got one of those for one time missing bed check. I was about ten miles away in a little town called Reichenbach, and I said, ―I’ve got to be back at the barracks at twelve‖, because if you have a pass you have to be home, you have to be back in the barracks in bed, at midnight when they make the bed check. He said, ―We’re calling a cab‖, but they had an overnight pass and they just tricked me. There was no cab coming and it got to be ten to and I said, ―You didn’t do anything‖, and they just laughed and they were in this bar in Reichenbach and they didn’t call, so I got a cab and got back to Baumholder, back to the barracks. I lived in the barracks for eight years, anyway, and that’s not fun. Anyway, I got an article fifteen and they didn’t want to—I told them my story and they didn’t want to hear it. 36:04 So, I got seven days shoveling coal as my punishment, because every room had a coal burning stove, that’s how we kept warm, so if your room was cold, you got some wood, and you got some coal and you made it warm, you didn’t just turn up the heat, or go and complain to somebody. I was up at five, because that’s when they got you up, and revalie was at 16 �six, so I was up, fully dressed in my clean fatigues, with my spit shined boot, had already made my bunk, and buffed the floor. I was doing something, I was buffing the floor, or something and I didn’t hear them yell outside. We had the formation at six and I looked out the window and there were a hundred and fifty of them standing outside and I’m standing in the room. They said, ―You missed formation Toms‖, and I said, ―I was buffing, and I didn’t hear anybody yell outside‖. 37:00 Once again, another article fifteen, another seven days shoveling coal. I went in there and they introduced me to the first sergeant, and he asked me if I had anything to say and I said, ―I was buffing, I was up fully dressed‖, and he told me to ―shut up‖, and get out of the orderly room and that I was getting an article fifteen, so I did just that. Anyway, that’s why I was a PFC for two years. Then while I was a PFC we had tank gunnery where we go to Grafenberg, which is a big former German training area over on the East German border. There were seventeen tanks in our company and we’d try to fire—you have a day course and a night course and they keep score and it’s an honor to fire high gun in the company. 38:04 I had a good tank commander, and I had a good driver, a good loader, and before we went to tank gunnery the commander said, ―We’re going to have an auction and we’re going to auction off these tanks. We’re going to have a contest and the tank that wins will get half the money, who won the competition, and the guy who buys the tank at the auction will get the other half of the money‖. I had been loaning out money, because somebody came down to my room and wanted to borrow five for ten and I thought, ―Pfffff, he is a sergeant and I’m a PFC, that’s great‖, and I said, ―I’ll give it to you, here’s five‖, and at the end of the month he gave me ten dollars. About a year later I had money loaned out to fifty-six different people and I had over twelve hundred dollars loaned out. 39:03 In 17 �fact, when we lined up for pay, and we lined up alphabetically and my name is Toms, and I’d have to stand in the pay line, because they paid you in cash, and I’d have to stand there for an hour. I told my platoon sergeant, ―I can’t wait in this line for an hour. I’ve got to get to Alpha, Bravo and Charlie Companies, because there are guys over there that owe me money and their names don’t start with T. They’ll be AB and C, and they’ll be down in the village drinking and spending money on those women, (I was going to use the other term that starts with W), and I’ll never get my money. I’m going now, and I’ll be back before they get to T‖, so I’d have to run to the company, with my book, get the money from them and then run back to the company. Anyway, when the auction came, come to find out, and I was still a PFC, the people who held all the ranks, they didn’t have any money. 40:02 So they started this auction, who wanted to buy this tank, who wanted to buy that tank, and there were only a couple of us that had any money and the people who were loaning out money were low ranking people. So finally a couple of sergeants said, ―They’ll probably have to go home and ask their wife for some money‖. Anyway, we had the auction and everybody was totally flabbergasted. I bought my tank and one other tank I thought would win. Anyway, to make a long story short, we won; we won the tank gunnery combined. We were in second place after the day run, and the night run, we won that too, so my tank sergeant, Easton, and I, we won the competition, so I got all the money. I got the money, because—you know now, I had to split it four ways. The money was split to four crew members, but they didn’t buy our tank, because they didn’t have any money, so I got more money than anybody. 41:00 We did win and we were part of the 18th Division and I found out that we were—our score was third highest in the 18th Division, and our battalion was fifty four tanks and we were the 18 �highest in our battalion with our score, but there were other tanks, maybe Bad Kreuznach, Mannheim and some other places, so we were third in the division, so we got in some van and they took us to Bad Kreuznach division headquarters and the division commander presented us with an engraved Ronson lighter that had the 18th Division crest on the lighter and I didn’t smoke, so I kept it and gave it to my mother when I got home, because she smoked, and my father did, so I gave her the engraved lighter. Interviewer: Now, how long did they have you in Germany for that tour? That was two years. Interviewer: Okay, are there other—why did you stay in the barracks the whole time? Was there just nowhere else to go? 42:00 You couldn’t, the only people that got to live in what’s known as family housing, were the people who were married. Interviewer: Right Only NCO’s and even just the higher ranking NCO’s and most of the officers, so I lived in the barracks with one company down , Bravo company, no Bravo company down— One company down and one company up, I can’t remember, I was in Echo Company first and then Alpha Company, but it was dangerous. They sold beer upstairs, they had a little restaurant up there and even the sergeants, they’d want to come down and fight at night. I remember, I pushed my wall locker away from the wall and they said, ―Rich is looking for you, Sergeant Rich‖, and I was a private. I had to hide behind that wall locker, because Rich wanted to come in and fight. The one time, I was down there in my room, I was down there visiting a friend of mine who was a fighter himself. 43:01 The door burst open and this guy named Greenway came bursting, came into the room and I had 19 �to—I’d been to town and in order to go to town then you had have a coat and tie on, you couldn’t just—no casual dress. I was standing there with my topcoat on and my tie and he burst in this room and he said, ―I think I could whip your ass, Toms‖. He flew into me, I was—he came across the room and I started to take my jacket off and I got both my arms behind me getting out of my jacket and he punched me in the face, but the thing was, he was about my size and I didn’t go down, but then somehow, even in the army, the guy had long hair and I got a hold of his hair and pulled him around and punched him a few times. Anyway, I got on top of him and I won this fight. But that was—I didn’t mention earlier, but I had fought in the Golden Gloves. 44:02 I was a fair to middling basketball player, but there were great fighters on this team at Godwin, where I went to high school and I got cut from the team, so I went and hung around with some tough guys and went down and fought in the Golden Gloves tournament in the Civic Auditorium and I lost to a guy from the Moose Lodge. It was a three round decision, so I learned an awful lot about boxing. I fought a lot of tough guys and I took a lot of beatings over there at the Westside Youth Commonwealth, in training. But I did learn a lot and it was okay, because I had gloves on and it was a sport, it wasn’t fighting, it was boxing, there’s a difference and I learned a lot, so I was able to get Greenway off my back and I punched him enough times that he quit, which was the only fight I won in my life, but I didn’t start it either, which was good. Interviewer: Did you get in many fights, or did you mostly stay away from them? Most of the time I tried to stay away from them, but one time I was with this tough guy, he was on the ship, Senna, and we were in Ebertsheim drinking. 45:07 We had gone outside and I didn’t know he was such a fired up guy, I knew he was probably the 20 �toughest person I had ever met in my life, we walked down the street and there were three black guys standing there and we just walked between them, I just walked between them on the sidewalk and one of them said something and Senna hit this guy and knocked him out in the street. I thought, ―Are you crazy?‖ So then, the two of them, the guy laid there, they took off running down the street the other way. I said, ―They’re coming back you fool‖, and we ran, we took off, we were all dressed, we had a top coat on, tie, coat, we ran down and hid behind some houses. The came down the street, and this is no lie, there’s five of them. Anyway, they came around the corner and they found us. 46:00 A guy came up to me, a huge guy, got me in a headlock and started punching the shit out of me. Anyway, I just remember Senna knocking people down. Anyway, the next thing I know this guys’ grip is relaxing on me, cuz I’m trying to flail away, but I couldn’t because this guy was twice as strong as I was and twice as big. Then Senna is punching this guy in the head who’s got me in the headlock, the guy releases me and goes down on the ground. There are a couple of guys laying there, one guy is running away and I never saw anything like it in my life. I fought in the Golden Gloves with guys who were city champions and I saw the best fighters who ever came out of this area and I really learned a lot, but this guy was unbelievable and he had never fought in the Golden Gloves. So then, I was bleeding, and I got a big scar right there and had about eight stitches there, I was bleeding and had blood all over my clothes, we ran down this alley and I knew they were coming back and they did, and I thought, ―They’ll kill us‖. 47:00 We crawled up on the top of a garage roof and lay down on our backs and we could hear them running up and down the alley looking for us and I thought—anyway, somehow they left and we made our way back to a bar and I got in the bathroom and cleaned myself up and we got 21 �back to Baumholder and I went down to the center and got my face stitched up, but there was an awful lot of that in the army. Interviewer: Life in the army at that point was, you had your duty and what you were doing and then there was drinking, and fighting and at least some of the womanizing that was sort of what one did. Yup, yup Interviewer: All right now, how long had you enlisted for? What was it? I enlisted for three years. Interviewer: Then did you then decide to go ahead and reenlist and stay in? Anyway, I started—I got the idea that since I wasn’t a stupid person, I could soldier and I could try to make it my life. 48:00 You have what is known as a guard mount, you go down there and you’re inspected for guard and there’s seven post, three men, three reliefs, there’s twenty-one guards, but there’s twenty-two people that report for guard. The one person on the guard mount will be picked as knowing military subject and he will be known as the Colonels orderly and he won’t have to walk guard, he’ll just have to go up and report to the Colonel and the Colonel will just say, ―Good job, make a pot of coffee and you’ll be free, you won’t have to walk guard and you’ll have the next day off‖. So, I thought that would be a good thing to do, so I shined up all my clothes, got new fatigues, went down and got the supply sergeant to give me—I traded in my field jacket, and I kinda got in good with him, because he was the volleyball coach and I was playing volleyball. I got completely—I got my whole uniform done over, so I was extremely—I was so sharp I could hardly walk. 49:00 All my stuff was pressed, starched, I had a clean haircut, spit shined, even when we had guard mount overshoes and 22 �field pants, I spit shined my goulashes, those buckle goulashes. I went down there to guard mount and I started answering those questions they would ask. They would ask you your weapon serial number and ask you about who’s the Secretary of Defense, who’s the—the one time the guy asked me, ―Who’s the prime minister of Egypt?‖, and I said it was Gamel Abdel Nasser and I was just a—I would read the Stars and Stripes, I was just a news junkie and I knew all this stuff. The only thing I had to do was brush up on military subjects, because they would ask yo some military things too, the maximum effective range of your pistol, and about tank gunnery and about all kinds of military stuff, map reading and everything. I started making Colonel's orderly and if you made it two times in a quarter you’d get a three day pass. I made it six times in a row and they always owed me a three day pass and they owed me a three day pass from the tank gunnery. 50:02 Then they said, ―If you make Colonel's orderly ten times, then you don’t have to pull guard any more‖, so I said, ―Okay, but I already made it six‖. The first sergeant, he hated my guts and he said, ―You start over at zero Toms‖, so I said, ―Okay‖, you obviously said ―Okay‖, so then I started making it again every time I was on guard and I made it six times in a row and I got up to ten and he said, ―You’re off guard‖. I went to the NCO Academy, volunteered, I’d just made E4 and the top ten percent graduates at the NCO Academy got promoted, so I went from one month—one month I was a PFC and a month later I was an E5, I jumped up two ranks after waiting two years in one rank. 51:00 I made two ranks in one month, so then I was a spec five and I didn’t have to pull KP anymore, I didn’t have to walk guard anymore, I’d already just made the sixteen times Colonel's orderly, but by then I was a knowledgeable soldier and I was sharp and I made soldier of the month there and I won the tank gunnery. 23 �Interviewer: Now, did you get a chance during that tour in Germany to go very far afield off base? Yeah, I had all these three day passes and I saved all my leave and I got there in February and I was really good with money even though, as an E2, I made eighty six dollars a month, but I saved I saved enough money somehow and I took a train and I went to Barcelona with this very tough person, Dan Senna, but we kinda argued a lot, so I wanted to do things my way and he was sure going to do things his way, but anyway, we went to Barcelona on the train and it was wonderful. I only had about twenty dollars to spend once I got there. 52:00 But, we stayed in a hotel in downtown Barcelona and went out to a place called Castle Hills, on the bus, and stayed out there for a week and then we came back on the train. I ended up going to Barcelona three times on that tour of three years and I went to Paris seven times on the train, because you just had to get to Reichenbach, which was about ten Kilometers away. The train from Frankfort to Paris went right past there and that was a stop, so you just had to get to Reichenbach and six hours later I was in Paris. Then I went to Amsterdam, I went almost twenty times to Amsterdam. Interviewer: Now, did you speak any European languages? I took a course, they had a course during the daytime in German--I took that. I took University of Maryland for three credit hours, I took that German. 53:00 I got quite good at it and they asked me, when the instructor left that taught the troops, the troop class each day, if I wanted to be an instructor, and I said, ―There’s no rank and I’ll end up being a spec five forever‖, so I didn’t take that job. I went back to the motor pool being a tank driver and gunner. 24 �Interviewer: So, how did you kind of get around otherwise if you’re in France, or in Spain, or someplace like that? Well, we’d always take the bus. They said, ―You should buy a car‖, but I didn’t want to buy a car, because I liked the public transportation and to me that was just a—I didn’t want to drive, not at all. For the whole tour I didn’t want to drive. Interviewer: In Europe you can get around pretty well public transportation. I always tool the bus and it was just great and it was no problem at all. 54:00 Then taking the train was just wonderful. It was eight hours to Amsterdam and I’d take that three day pass and leave on Friday and I’d be in the club car, get something to eat there and it was just absolutely wonderful. Go from there to Koblenz, change at Koblenz, into Bingen and into Amsterdam. I’d get myself a hotel room; it was just paradise, that’s why I went there so many times. It was actually the best years of my life. I didn’t have very much money, it was just the whole thing, Amsterdam, it was the start of the music thing—I didn’t—I was just a--I just loved the music, I liked all the women in Amsterdam, I liked the drinking and all that, but to me the music was the most—the greatest thing. I remember being in the bars and those Beatles songs would come on and everybody in the bar would be standing singing those songs. Total strangers would have their arms around me, it was just the most fantastic thing and I just loved it. 55:02 of course coming back on Sunday with a hangover was pretty rough. Interviewer: Now, when that tour in Germany finishes then what happens to you? Well, I applied for OCS and I came back and I went to—I applied for infantry and they said, ―You have enough math‖, because I had four years of high school math, trigonometry, geometry and everything, so they sent me to Fort Sill to artillery OCS, a six 25 �months course and I was there four months. I quit after four months, because my grades as a lower--middle classman were fine, but I could see that I wasn’t going to be as knowledgeable as I should have been to be an officer in artillery, so I quit before they quit me. 56:02 I didn’t want to flunk out, so I quit at the end of that, and I have a little bit of a problem standing up in front of a group, so we had some group and giving a presentation I’d choke up. I did that a couple of times and I thought, ―I have to get over this‖. It was really embarrassing to have a firing mission and not be able to talk, it was sort of like in ―The King's Speech‖, it was like that and back in Canada I used to sing ―God Save the King‖. I was King George the VI, from the movie ―The King's Speech‖. Interviewer: Now, did you take steps to kind of learn how to talk in front of people? Well, after I flunked out of OCS after four months I was kind of depressed and I was assigned—I was sent to the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Benning and I was in the motor pool, it was in armor and they had tanks there. I could really drive that tank and I was the only one that could drive the tank on the train. 57:05 They were going to ship tanks to North Carolina for a maneuver and nobody could drive the tank onto the train car. I said, ―I’ve driven plenty of them on the railcar‖, because it’s scary, you go up like this and you can’t see anything except the sky and then the tank falls forward. You’re on the ramp and it falls forward and you’re on the train while somebody is on the ground walking you forward, ground guiding you and I could drive the tank on the train, so I drove all the tanks in the company on the train. Anyway, I made the—they asked if anybody wanted to go airborne, they had an airborne class and they got nine hundred people and they needed fifty more just to fill up the class. ―Even though you guys are in armor, do you want to go airborne?‖ I said, ―Hell yes, after that OCS thing, I’m ready, I’ll jump out, I’ll 26 �do anything‖. I was just kind of depressed with my accomplishments. 58:00 Anyway, I went to that airborne school, nine hundred, and that was tough, but I was really good, not great, but a really good athlete, but that airborne training was tough and I almost didn’t make a certain part of it, because I had trouble doing this PLF, parachute landing fall. You’re hooked up in a harness, they swing you back and forth and they drop you. You have to hit and do a perfect parachute landing fall and I was borderline, but on my very last one, they said, ―We’ll give you one last chance Toms and if you hit this one, you’re going forward‖, I hit it and I got to go. Anyway, up there with sixty-four jumpers, it was unbelievable. They opened that door up and I jumped out of that airplane and I jumped out twice on my birthday. I’m not even in the infantry and I jumped out twice on my birthday and I’ll tell you it was exciting. Interviewer: How old were you by that time? Twenty-six, twenty-five-- anyway I made soldier of the month, battalion soldier of the month. 59:02 Then went to training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and they said, ―We don’t want you to go with us, you stay back and study for division soldier of the month‖, so I stayed back and studied, but then I never--then Vietnam picked up and the 11th Air Assault changed to the 1st Cav and I never, ever, did go up for division soldier of the month, because I got sent over there to the 1st Cav and it was back to being a nothing. I got assigned to this company and I was a spec five. They were all—just lines and lines, hundreds of helicopters and Chinooks and Hueys and I was just off a tank from an office over in Sand Hill, this is a different part of Fort Benning. They assigned me—they said, ―Well, we’re leaving in a week Toms, you’ve got to go over and get POR qualified‖, which meant qualified to ship out to Vietnam. 00:02 They said, ―You better go over 27 �and get your shots, we’re going to give them all to you in one day, because you don’t have time‖, so they gave me seven shots, so then I went down to the flight—they said, ―Go on down to the flight line‖, so I got down there and you meet your crew. So, I got down there and met them and I started to pass out, because they gave me all these shots. I said, ―I’m sorry I got to sit down‖, and I sat down and passed out and laid over there for a while, because I had all these shots going in me. Interviewer: At this point, you say you’re coming in from tanks, so you don’t know anything about the helicopters or whatever, what kind of assignment did they give you then? They said, ―You’re going to be a door gunner, because you’re in armor and you know a little bit about weapons. You fired machine guns and you know a little bit about them. You know how to take apart a thirty caliber machine gun‖. 1:00 I said, ―Oh yeah‖, ―And fire these weapons?‖ I said, ―Oh yeah‖, and that’s what they did with all the tankers, they made them door gunners. They said, ―You’re going to get flight pay‖, and I, for years, made $99.37 and now as a spec five, I was making $210.00. To make another eighty some dollars flight pay and be a member of a flight crew was--I thought, ―This is really special‖, so that’s what I did. And then just like in the movie with Mel Gibson there, we were soldiers, we were young. We took the bus to Charleston, south Carolina and there was a band playing ―When Johnny Comes Marching Home‖, we got up on it and took that ship, got on there and they said, ―You’re in C compartment‖, and I thought, ―I remember that, that’s KP‖, and I said, ―I don’t pull KP, I’m a spec five‖, see, I was still mouthy, and he said, ―You’re going to be a KP pusher, you go to the mess hall. You’ll be in charge of the KP‖. 2:00 I thought, ―The whole thirty days‖. We left and 28 �went down past Cuba, through the Panama Canal, that was exciting, landed fifteen days later at Long Beach. It’s not like the movie where everybody gets off, goes into town and gets drunk, except one person from the platoon, a thirty man platoon, he gets to go in. Of course it was kiss ass Schoenborn; he got to go into Long Beach and the rest of us, twenty-nine of us, we just stood on the deck looking at Long Beach. We were there for a day, they had to fuel it up and get more food on, or whatever and we left for Vietnam. Fifteen days later, it was just like a big lake, we fired machine guns off the back, pistols, and rifles, fired everything off the back deck. We did PT on deck every day and then down in the kitchen. It was a little better because I was a spec five, unlike the first trip there was no trouble, no fighting. 3:01 Then we got to Vietnam, we stopped and you could just barely see the shore, but I could hear cannon fire, ―boom‖, and I thought, ―My God‖, ―boom‖. Interviewer: What did you know about Vietnam at this point? I was a phys-ed major in college and I was geography minor, so I knew right where we were, and crossing the International Date Line I knew what part of the world we were in. I knew that we had been there before and I knew about the French at Dien Bien Phu, I knew the history and I knew about Ho Chi Minh and I knew about China. The reason we went to Vietnam was justified, bona fide, the reason we went there was to stop the spread of communism. The communists were in Cuba, they were in all the European countries, and communists were very big in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, even in England. 4:04 And they were all over South and Central America, of course, China, Russia and they were in North Vietnam and that’s why we were in South Vietnam, to stop it, that was far enough, that’s why we were there. I know the premise, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and 29 �all that was falling, but we were in there and I wasn’t running that. Anyway we got off and came down those cargo chutes with all that equipment. I had that M-60 machine gun and I don’t even know how I carried all that, because I weighed a hundred and –I fought in the golden gloves at 126 and that’s what I weighted when I came off that ship and still do. I got in that big landing barge and I kind of laughed, because I never thought we’d go over the edge, over the side of that ship on the cargo net. Anyway, I crawled down there and somehow I ended up in the front of the landing barge and standing there I thought, ―It must be the Colonel‖, and I can’t remember his name, but he had a horse and I wish I could remember his name. 5:07 He was kind of eccentric, he was kind of a famous guy. Interviewer: He had been in the Cavary a while. Yeah, and he had a horse and I was just somehow standing behind him, just fate, and we got up to the shore and that big door came down and everybody walked off in about a foot of water. We walked in there and there were television cameras and photographers and everything. We went in and we went through there and I just looked around and I had no idea that I was ever going to be on the front of a magazine. We went and got on a C-124 and we flew to An Khe and it was dark when we got there and I had no idea and they said, ―You all set up your tents‖. Everybody had a shelter hat and teamed up with somebody and put up a pup tent wherever you wanted to. The next day, they were all over the place jumbled up and not very military. So, then after that, the next day, we had to get up and line them all up, which is natural, because we were in the army. 6:01 We used those pup tents about the first two months, but it rained every night and every night the rain would just come through the tent and you’d have to get out of your sleeping bag, 30 �hold up all of your bedding, and squat inside that pup tent while that rain ran through the tent and then you’d lay it back down again and go back to sleep. Interviewer: Did you have air mattresses? Yes, we had air mattresses, but for some reason they did not keep you off the ground high enough to stop that waster from soaking that sleeping bag, because they were hanging all over the next morning. Interviewer: Yeah, so once the flood water went away you could lay them back down. The thing was, the very first morning it was so different. It was like when you go from Michigan to Florida. The fauna, the trees, everything, the smell and everything and when that sun came up the next morning it was like misty and I thought it was just like being— such a strange thing, I had never been in anything like that, except maybe Florida maybe, because I’d gone down to Florida, hitchhiked down there actually. 7:08 I saw a line of about two or three hundred Vietnamese workers, and those conical hats and black pajamas, five hundred yards away on the other side of the airstrip, and I thought, ―God, this is really the orient, look at these strange people‖. I was really something, and the smell, that ground was red and it smelled different, because everything smelled different. Anyway, An Khe, where we were, was a big circle with all the units around the circle and in the center were four hundred and thirty-five helicopters, including six of those flying cranes, those big grasshopper looking affairs. The first day they started flying and they said, ―You’re just going to be on standby Toms, because we don’t have a crew for you. There are ten helicopters in your platoon, but you’re going to be an extra, but you can fly right now‖. 8:08 So, the first day, I went over there and they showed me about the 31 �rockets and M-60 machine guns and I was in charge of loading up these rocket pods, seven rockets on each side, two M-60 machine guns, that were belt fed, on each side and then the crew chief, he had an M-60 machine gun and I, the door gunner, had an M-60 machine gun and I fired out. The door was open and I sat on a little seat. I was in charge of loading up the ammunition, cleaning those six M-60 machine guns and loading up the rocket pods we were flying. Then about a week later there was a guy in the next bunk to me and I can’t remember—I just remember his name was Knight and they went out, I was in the tent and they came back and said that Knight got hit and they said, ―You’re going to take his place‖. 9:02 I never—they came in—―Knight got killed‖, that’s what they said, and they folded up his bunk, picked up his stuff and took it up to supply and I took Knight's place. I never saw that, and after that and I thought, ―This is real stuff, Knight’s dead‖, and I didn’t know him from a hill of beans. I didn’t even talk much to him, because for some reason I was off on detail and I didn’t see much of him, so I took his place. We started going on these missions and supporting the infantry in what they were doing. We’d go to Pleiku a lot and I remember they’d take that helicopter down the riverbeds, low, ten feet off the water and there would be Vietnamese just standing in the river, crossing, or doing whatever, or fishing, or washing clothes and they’d see us coming and they’d lay down, lay down in the water, because they didn’t know what we were going to do, because we were harm. Interviewer: At this point did you have any orders? Were you looking for things to shoot at, or were you just on reconnaissance? 10:03 We would shoot at whatever we were told to shoot at. We would—now I was a spec five and they didn’t really come out and tell us very much about what we were doing, or 32 �anything else. Later on when I got to be an E8, I would always call the platoon together and I would give them a, what we called, a five paragraph field order. Situation, admission, execution, logistics, I can’t remember all five parts of it, but I would tell everybody what’s going on and I said, ―The reason I’m telling you guys is to bring you into play, so you know what the hell is going on and this isn’t just boredom, even if it is just a field problem, you still have situation, admission, execution, a five paragraph field order‖. No one ever gave that to me, so consequently, most of the time I was ill informed and I didn’t know what was going on and what units of the enemy we were supposed to engage in. 11:01 Interviewer: When you first got there, was it 1965? 1965 in July Interviewer: Okay, so you’re with the 1st Cavalry Division, 1st Battalion, 9th Cavalry, with helicopter units. This is really the first large [division sized] army formation that went into Vietnam at that point, and when you were based there at An Khe, initially, was there a lot of security around the base? Were they worried at that point about Viet Cong attacks and things like that, or was it fairly loose when you first got there? Well, we had full guard every night. We’d have at least two hours in a fox hole with sandbags around it, close to where our tents were. That was what was known as the inner perimeter, but then they had an outer perimeter, which was up the hill out further, but I never got assigned to the outer perimeter. So, we were the second line of defense. 12:00 But, sitting out there on guard and every—I don’t know, it was just, at night you’d be looking into—and there would be shadows and things and it was scary, because these 33 �people could crawl up on you. When I was a kid I used to do that, when I was a kid I was always the Indian and that was my bit. I would crawl up and I could tell you a lot more stories about being in the army at the NCO Academy, I was really good at crawling up on people and sneaking up on—especially, even in the daylight, because like I said before, I was always the Indian. I know these people could crawl up on you in the dark and all of a sudden be right onto you, and you’d be overwhelmed really quick. So, I didn’t have any problem with falling asleep on guard. I had a little problem with every shadow, it was something. There were a few times when we parked these helicopters, out on the different operations, where—well, you’re out on guard and here are these great big helicopters there on a dry spot in the middle of a bunch of rice paddies. 13:03 And I thought, ―Oh my God, I’m out here all by myself, everybody else is asleep, two helicopters by themselves and in the daytime there’s all kinds of Vietnamese and then they kind of fade away. Well, who knows who they are, so they could be sneaking up on you‖, so I’m kind of hustling around there, moving around these two helicopters for my two hours and then I’m supposed to go to sleep and I’m a case of nerves, because I knew that they could—anybody that’s armed with even a bow could sneak up on you and kill you in a minute. Just with not even a real weapon, or even a spear. There were people, when we were off, over by Pleiku, fifty miles away, not very far, there were Montagnards and they had spears and we’d see them all the time. Primitive people with a loin cloth on and that was all and they’d be out tending some kind of little plot of ground they had, growing some things. 14:04 I was kind of terrified at night and I was glad when it finally got daylight and you could see. Interviewer: Did you actually get people infiltrating the base and doing damage? 34 �They did, but not—only one time and it was in Hong Kong Mountain. One time we were woken with a lot of racket and they had gotten up on top of Hong Kong Mountain and there was a platoon of people up there all the time and they attacked them. You could hear a lot of things going off and see some flashes of light, but they were repulsed by the people in the 1st Cav. Interviewer: But the base that you were actually on did not get infiltrated? We never did, we were just sitting there, everybody knew where we were, there were twenty-five thousand troops, it was a large division, the 1st Cavalry, the entire division was in one big circle and we were sitting right there. Everybody knew, everybody in North Vietnam, and China, knew exactly where we were sitting. 15:02 Interviewer: There may have been a certain amount of safety in numbers there against that kind of infiltration. Oh, there was, and like I said, two perimeters and I just had an M-16 and I wasn’t armed with anything special. At night you don’t have much in field of fire, because somebody could be up on you in a minute. Interviewer: Right, and did you have Vietnamese working on the base during the day? We had a Vietnamese, it was a tall Vietnamese, the tallest I had ever seen, was our interpreter and there were a lot of civilian day laborers. There was nobody there at night. During the day they would come in, but not in our immediate area, not in our company, or in our troop area, not close to us at all. We’d just see them out there doing things on the heli pad, or doing different things, but with supervision in a large group. 16:00 You could go into the village, sometimes they would let you get on—you could walk to the 35 �village, about two miles into An Khe, or you could jump on a truck, You could just stick out your thumb, everybody stops. We’d go into the village, but you had to have everything with you and we’d go into the village for some women, they had what was known at ―boom, boom girls‖, for some ―boom, boom‖ and it was about a hundred dong, about a dollar. Anyway, we’d get on a truck and you could go in there for the day, but you had to have all your stuff with you. You had to have your web gear on, your—you didn’t have to take your steel helmet, but you had to have your weapon with you. I had a... being on a helicopter, I had a pistol, a forty-five, which is the same pistol I had when I was in tanks. We were in armor and we don’t carry rifles in armor, our personal weapon is a pistol and I did qualify expert with a pistol. 17:02 I missed that in rifle by two, but I could fire—when they gave me a pistol I thought, ―Oh good, a second chance, they’re giving me a chance again to get that expert rating‖, and I did with the pistol, and actually, it was relatively easy. Interviewer: Now, was it safe to go back and forth to An Khe at that point? Yeah, we never—there were a lot of people when we were in the village and they were selling beer and Schnapps and beer, there were two kinds of beer, ―Tiger LaRue‖ and ― 33 Bop‖, which was known as ―Bomb a Reba‖, I don’t know how much that means, I can count, but you had to know how to count, because you had to tell those ―boom, boom girls‖ how much you were going to pay, you needed to—they liked to dicker a bit, not a great amount, but you could dicker. Interviewer: Then did they make sure that everybody came back at night? Well, you came back on your own, you were told, yeah, told. It was on a river and they had a water purification truck down there, there was no bottled water. 18:01 I think 36 �that’s what would do some damage, and something about some flak, about some corruption, something about millions and millions of dollars in contracts for bottled water. I said, ―I don’t care, we’re not in Iraq, you can get water out of the water buffalo like I did, that’s why we have water purification teams, I don’t need bottled water. Your bottle is your canteen, fill it up with water out of the water buffalo, it’s water, you don’t need to have a plastic bottle‖. Interviewer: Well, I guess we’ve gone upscale as far as that. Well, it’s costing us too much money we don’t have. Interviewer: All right, how long was it before your division started to get into large scale action after you got there? In October, that’s when they said there’s a big thing—they over ran Plei Me, but then that was an outpost armed by ARVN’s. 19:03 Army of the Republic of Vietnam and the people that over ran them were people known as PAVN’s, People’s Army of Vietnam and I said to a really good friend of mine, ―What are we doing fighting the people?‖ Anyway, I said, ―It’s the People’s Army of Vietnam‖, anyway, a great friend of mine. So anyway, things really started happening then and they said, ―The 7th Cav’s involved and we’re going to be supporting them‖, so we just loaded up those machine guns and those rockets and we would fire everything, though I can actually say, I never saw a North Vietnamese soldier. I never—we would unload and we would fire that stuff where we were directed by the people on the ground and we would come back to the, what they called the heli pad, the ―golf course‖, the big circle, and we would load up the rockets again, load up the machine guns and go and unload the thing three, or four, times a day and we would do that every day for a month, every day seven days a week. 20:08 37 �Interviewer: So it’s not just that intuition fight in the Ia Drang Valley for that first Mel Gibson movie part of it, but continued action in that area over that period of months. We knew there were American troops down there, we could see some of them One time they said that there wasn’t a medevac around and would we land and pick up a wounded soldier, so we landed the helicopter and we thought, ―Ppppp, here we are sitting in the middle of all this stuff‖, and here’s this guy, a great big black guy, and he must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. We were--me and the crew chief, we got this big guy under his arms and started pulling him and he had a big hole in his stomach. I thought, ―My God‖, because I’d never seen anybody wounded like that. 21:01 He had a—there was nothing coming out of it, it was just a big hole about an inch in diameter. I thought, ―My God look at this, don’t look at that, you might get sick‖. We got him up into the helicopter and laid him on the floor and took off. I thought, ―I’m glad we’re back up in the air, because obviously, whoever shot this guy is not very far away and I’m glad the helicopter got off the ground again‖. We’d fly in pairs and we’d usually fly with the same helicopter behind us. We would be the lead helicopter, because our pilot was a Captain, yeah, Captain Kidd, the name of the pirate. Anyway, we were flying alone, we had a 1st Lieutenant copilot, we were flying, it was in the Ia Drang Valley, and he said, ―Where’s, what’s his name?‖ 22:02 B-1, B-2, they had a code name of the helicopter and they were Charlie something, it was, we were Charlie 3 and they were Charlie 4, he said, ―Where’s Charlie 4?‖ I looked around and said, ―I don’t see them‖, and I didn’t think anything of it, and come to find out, they were gone. They got shot down and we never saw the four people in that tank crew, in that helicopter, never saw then again, and I 38 �thought, ―My God‖. We went back down to An Khe, landed that helicopter and he said, ―Their chopper’s parked right beside us, you got to be kidding me‖, and I never saw those people again. I can remember one, the pilot, or the copilot was a Hawaiian warrant officer and he was--it seemed like he was about twenty years old, of course he was a little bit older, for just a young, fresh faced, guy and I never saw any of those people again. Interviewer: But, the chopper itself got back? No, the chopper was gone. 23:00 Interviewer: Oh, so when you got back there was a place where the chopper should be, but it wasn’t there? And I, really—that’s how this really was, and in real combat you don’t really see—it’s not all—the enemy’s not out there, it’s not frontal attacks like, maybe, it was in Korea, it’s just a strange thing, all of a sudden somebody’s there and then they’re gone. They were gone and I never saw them again. Interviewer: Now, did you take much ground fire at this point? One time I was on KP, even though I was a spec five, and a guy named Meyers, who I had been playing cards with the night before, owed me forty dollars, and he’s firing the machine gun out of the helicopter, taking my place and he fires the machine gun into the rocket pod. The pod blew up and brought the chopper down, it blew up and he got a wound in his leg, so they evacuated him to Japan, with my forty bucks. 24:07 But, he lived and I thought, ―Oh god, there goes—there’s that‖, and one other time we were going out in the jungle there and Warrant Officer Green said, ― The stick’s dead, we’ve lost hydraulics‖, and that might have been caused by ground fire. The hydraulics went and he said, ―We’re going to land it and it’s going to be rough‖, so the propeller keeps 39 �turning, but he auto rotated the chopper down to the ground, but it came down and he said, ―Hold on‖, So I grabbed on and that thing hit the ground, ―kabam‖, and bounced about three times and finally came to rest and then somebody came and picked us up and we left that helicopter sitting right there and never saw it again either. 25:01 We were lucky that helicopter didn’t crash, because it was—I don’t know how he even found an open space, because there were trees everywhere, vegetation and, you know, you can’t hit anything, the helicopter’s like a big spider with that chopper going around, you can’t hit anything, or it well just flip right over. He landed it on the skids and it bounced there on the ground and we jumped off and grabbed all our stuff, weapons, grabbed the weapons and as much as we could and threw them in this other helicopter and got out of there without the rockets. Interviewer: Now, what you’re doing, you’re landing in the middle of nowhere and there’s not American forces around. I know it, yeah 25:37 The end of interview tape I 40 �41 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Veterans History Project Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grand Valley State University. History Department Description An account of the resource The Library of Congress established the Veterans History Project in 2001 to collect memories, accounts, and documents of U.S. war veterans from World War II and the Korean War, Vietnam War, and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to preserve these stories for future generations. The GVSU History Department interviews are part of this work-in-progress, and may contain videos and audio recordings, transcripts and interview outlines, and related documents and photographs. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1914- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Afghan War, 2001--Personal narratives, American Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979-1981--Personal narratives, American Korean War, 1950-1953--Personal narratives, American Michigan--History, Military Oral history Persian Gulf War, 1991--Personal narratives, American United States--History, Military United States. Air Force United States. Army United States. Navy Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Personal narratives, American World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James Boring, Frank Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource eng Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/455">Veterans History Project interviews (RHC-27)</a> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context TomsA Title A name given to the resource Toms, Alan (Interview transcript and video, 1 of 2), 2011 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Toms, Alan Description An account of the resource Alan Toms was born in Toronto, Canada in 1939. Because of his father's occupation, Toms' and his family moved several times while Toms was a child, eventually ending up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After graduating from high school, Toms attended junior college in Grand Rapids before enrolling at Western Michigan University, although he eventually left the university. After leaving Western Michigan, Toms joined the Army and went through his basic training and armored AIT at Fort Knox, Kentucky. From Fort Knox, Toms deployed to Germany for a three-year tour as part of an armored unit. After his tour in Germany, Toms went to the artillery OCS at Fort Sill, Oklahoma but did not do well and eventually transferred to the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Georgia. While at Fort Benning, Toms went through Airborne training before transferring to the 1st Cavalry Division and was with the division when it deployed to Vietnam. While in Vietnam, Toms served as a door gunner aboard a helicopter. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Kentwood Historic Preservation Commission (Kentwood, Mich.) WKTV WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States--History, Military Michigan--History, Military Veterans Video recordings United States. Army Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Personal narratives, American Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-03-10 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/455">Veterans History Project Collection, (RHC-27)</a> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/87ef320c2e1addac1d5093fdae0861a9.jpg 070f4f1ad02669cbe2edbddecd9b2e9c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert H. Merrill photographs Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Merrill, Robert H., 1881-1955 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1909/1950 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Robert H. Merrill papers (RHC-222) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-222 Description An account of the resource Photographs, negatives, and lantern slides digitized from the papers of engineer and archaeologist Robert H. Merrill. A Grand Rapids native, Merrill held an accomplished career as a civil engineer. He founded the company Spooner & Merrill, which held offices in Grand Rapids and Chicago. From 1919-1921, Merrill lived in China, working as Assistant Principal Engineer on a reconstruction of the Grand Canal - the oldest and longest canal system in the world. Merrill became fascinated by archaeology, and among other projects, he traveled to the Uxmal Pyramids in Yucatan, Mexico, with a research expedition from Tulane University. Merrill's photo collection includes images of his travels and projects, friends and family. Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Merrill_Films_B_011 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1936-09-19 Title A name given to the resource Tony holding tooth Description An account of the resource Black and white photograph of a man, Tony, holding a mammoth tooth in front of a house. Subject The topic of the resource Archaeology Hopkins (Mich.) Mammoths Allegan County (Mich.) Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Robert H. Merrill papers (RHC-222) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpg Language A language of the resource eng Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Merrill, Robert H., 1881-1955 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ce509b1c5c2c49ae0af0b21205938602.mp4 ccaf320fa925713c765843dcd7aa0415 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/447538e620c6b8563e511917206f1c55.pdf ce650e902dc7824aa4191b82f0e902fc PDF Text Text Living with PFAS Interviewer: Dani DeVasto Interviewee: Tony Spaniola Date: September 24, 2021 DD: I am Dani DeVasto and today, September 24, 2021, I have the pleasure of chatting with Tony Spanoila. Hi Tony. TS: Hi, how are you? DD: I’m doing well, how are you? TS: Doing well, thanks. DD: Awesome. Can you tell me about where you’re from, Tony, and where you currently live? TS: Sure, so I currently live in southeast Michigan. Uh, I’m an attorney here, but I also have a home in Oscoda Michigan on Van Etten Lake directly across from the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. And, um, that is significant for your project, I think, because the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base is the first recorded PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances] site in Michigan. It was discovered by the state of Michigan to have a PFAS problem in 2010. So, that would be- what is it, 11 plus years ago from when we’re talking now. It also, interestingly enough, happens to be the first reported U.S. [United States] military installation in the world at which PFAS, uh, was publicly reported. And so now there are 100s that have been identified all over the world. And so, we’re really in the forefront- and have been in the forefront in a lot of ways, both in Michigan, nationally, and worldwide on the PFAS issue. DD: How long have you had a house up in Oscoda? Or how long have you been going up to Oscoda? TS: Well so, um, we have had our place there for over 20 years. It was in the late 90’s. And my wife, however, has been going up there since the 1960’s. Her family had another home on the same lake decades ago, so she has been going there since she was a little girl with a little kind of period in between, and then back again in the late 90’s. So, long time. DD: Yeah, a long time. TS: Yeah. DD: Tony, can you tell me a story about your experience with PFAS or with PFAS in your community? TS: I could tell you stories that would keep us here all day. [laughs] DD: [laughs] That’s what I’m here for. TS: Yeah, well so, maybe we start at the beginning, right? Um, so, in 2016 I picked up a copy of the Detroit Free Press, still delivered in the paper form- [computer beeps] [both laughing] to my house. And on the front page- the front-page headline that day, it was in March of 2016, said “the next water crisis in Michigan may be in northern Michigan,” or something like that- I- that’s not the exact headline. But the point was we were right in the throes of the Flint Water Crisis- was in the news all the time. And here was a headline saying, “looks like there might be another one of these on the horizon in northern Michigan,” 1 �and in my first- my first thought was wow, that’s too bad. And my second thought was, really mortification because there was a picture of our lake under the headline. DD: Hmm. TS: And so, initially, we were told that, uh, there was a drinking water concern that was raised in the article. We were told that our home, which is on the east side of Van Etten Lake- um, on the opposite side of the lake from the air force base, that our home probably wasn’t impacted. That it probably hadn’t made it across the water to- to the lake water to our place. Well, about what- 6 or 7 months later we got a letter from the Health Department, saying well we’re not so sure about that. In fact, you shouldn’t drink your water. And we’re having a meeting in Oscoda to talk about all of that. So, it was- it was late October, about 2016 ,that this really hit home and here we are at a public meeting talking about- you shouldn’t be drinking your water, and here’s what it means and all of that stuff that just comes raining down upon you, um, when water is called into question and you’ve been drinking it for years, and years, and your pets and your- and I mean just, question after question, after question that goes through your mind. And for me it was particularly poignant, um, and meaningful because in the 1970’s and early 80’s my father was an elected official in the Michigan house of representatives. And at that time Michigan was going through what was then called the largest contamination crisis in US history. Caught it from a chemical called polybrominated biphenyl or PBB which got into the food chain initially in cattle feed, but then tainted, um, other livestock feed, and got into the entire food chain. All of MI was poisoned with PBB [polybrominated biphenyl]. And it just so happened that I was a young man at the time, um, my father spearheaded legislate- first the investigation into it, and then legislation that regulated- set a limit on uh, on the uh- acceptable levels in food, provided, provide for the destruction of the contaminated livestock, paid the farmers for their losses, and then set up funding for a long-term health study of the impacted people in Michigan. And that study is still going on today almost 50 years later on the 3rd generation of people who are impacted. So, it just so happened that I had taken a year off between high school and college and shadowed my father- went along with him to all the meetings, met with all of the impacted people, saw what happened to them, it was just- a horrific, horrific, horrific episode, that was- made the nation news regularly. It was the subject of Hollywood movies, it was the subject of television shows, it was the subject of books, and it was an experience that I thought would be kinda a once in a lifetime thing. DD: [sighs] TS: And I- I mean, it certainly impacted me in a very big way. You don’t meet people who are suffering like the people I’ve met and not come away very moved by what went on, how terrible it was. Um, but I think afterwards I thought that this was so bad and there was- and at the time- like there was a recall effort out against the governor- it was just- it was probably the biggest political issue in Michigan I think in my lifetime. And so, I naively thought that some lessons had been learned from that. And that I would- never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would see something like that again, let alone be, um, the subject of it. So, as I’m sitting in that meeting, and fortunately my father’s still alive- my father came with me. And it was kind of a role reversal because he went- I used to go with him and he would bounce things off me and now it was- here he and I was sitting in one of these meetings again you know, 50 years later. And so, you can only imagine the thoughts that were swirling through my mind at the time. Um, and I think, I remember saying, “You know, I’ve seen this film before, and now I’m in it.” Right? [laughs] You know? DD: Yeah, I know. TS: And so, it was- a very moving situation. And in the initial phase of it, that very first meeting, I felt mostly pretty decent. There were some initial red flags, but they were- “they” meaning the air force, which was the party that caused the problem and the state of Michigan which was supposed to be the 2 �regulator- I thought they were being reasonable. They, they came to us, and they said, “Look we haven’t tested,” for example, my home. They hadn’t tested the, the well of my home. “But what we’re going to do is we’re going to give you a point of use filter for your kitchen sink- a reverse osmosis system to takethat will- that should take the stuff out.” Now that was not- that was in my mind a short term stop gap approach but something- it was needed right away. DD: [unclear] TS: To just deal with one sink in your house, think of all the places- think of all the places that you use water in your homes and the various different ways you use them. One sink doesn’t cut the mustard. And so, it was like, ok but at least they’re trying. At least they’re doing this to try to get ahead of the problem. Unfortunately, that proved to be wrong. Um, what I learned, and this is- as we’ll, I assume, discuss- I’ve become quite a PFAS activist in the time that’s transpired since. It was not my intention to do that initially. In fact, I had a discussion with my wife, and we both said we’re not going to get- we’re not going to stick our noses too far into this- believe it or not. Because we- as part-time residents there- first of all in Michigan you know when you go up north, you go to get away from problems, right? [chuckles] DD: Ah-hmm. TS: And so, the first impedisis was, “we really don’t want to bring more into our lives up here, this is a gateway for us.” But secondly, I was very respectful- and still am- but I was very mindful of the fact that I don’t live there year-round. I mean, I’m there a lot, it’s not like a place that you- you know- it’s a- house, we’re there year-round. But this was something that I felt the community really needed to be a part of and that I didn’t really initially feel that I was enough a member of the quote unquote permanent community there to be sticking my noise in. DD: Sure. TS: So all those reasons, plus you just don’t want the hassle. But as I learned, I kept asking questions. In fact, the very first red flag that came up for me occurred on the night of the meeting itself. Um, I had done some very quick research before going to the meeting, just- online, reading stories and checking into this. The one thing I knew from PBB is that in the initial phases of a contamination problem, or in certain habit of PBB there’s a tendency to downplay the problem. There’s a tendency to- set to- look at levels and make and the tendency- to be too high, to not be safe enough. And so, we were being told at the time that the environmental protection agency had set an advisory, not a, which is not- which the still a casethere’s no regulation at the Federal level in place, but they had set an advisory of 70 parts per trillion of 2 of what I’ve now learned are more than 7000 and it’s a growing number- of the class of PFAS chemicals. PFOA [Perfluorooctanoic acid] and PFOS [Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid] were the 2 that were subject to this advisory- and so, at 70 parts per trillion. Well, research that I had found, particularly a study from Harvard University, indicated that really the number should be more like 1. And so, my first question at the public meeting was, “Okay, I’m hearing 70 from you folks, but I’m reading 1. What do you make of that?” And the initial response- this was from the state health department at the time- the initial response was [computer noises], “Well you’re getting a filter. It will take your PFOA and PFOS down below 1, so you shouldn’t be worried.” And I thought to myself, well okay, but that doesn’t give me a whole lot of assurance and- I’m only using that one source. And then the official in the health department came up to me after the meeting. And he whispered in my ear so no one else would hear and he said, where did you hear about that health study, that Harvard study? And I said, I googled it. DD: [laughs] 3 �TS: For people nowadays, they may not know what that means but I searched for it on the internet, I just searched PFAS and I found it and I read it in a newspaper article. And it became very clear not only that he hadn’t read it, but that he wasn’t even aware of it. DD: [computer chimes] TS: And so, I offered to send it. I said, “Well would you like to see it?” [Computer noises] And he said, “Yeah, I’d love to see it.” And so, I did that, and the red flag that went up for me was- wait a second, they’re telling me what’s safe, but they didn’t even read the- at least one of the really important studies. So that was like red flag number 1. They agreed, however, to review it. So I thought okay, well let’s be reasonable. Let’s review it, when they said they would get back to me, they initially said it would take them 3 months. Which yes, I know you’re raising your eyebrows and that seemed a bit long to me, but I, again- wanting to give the benefit of the doubt and be as reasonable as possible. DD: Um-hmm. TS: Well, the 3 months came, and the 3 months went. And I didn’t get a-I didn’t hear from him. So I followed up, I think probably in the 4th month and said “Hey, just checking in.” And the response was that there were other matters that were more important and they were too busy and it was not a priority. As it turns out, I don’t know that they ever reviewed it. On your side of the state, Dani, you’re aware of the wolverine PFAS contamination, well, that really hit the news- my first encounter was in October of 2016. The, to put it in context, the wolverine issue really started popping in the summer- late summer of 2017so a little less than a year later. The agency still hadn’t reviewed this Harvard study, and then when they came over to talk to the folks in Kent County about the PFAS problem there, they were still citing the 70 parts per trillion number and I thought, “Wait a second.” So I emailed them again. During that time period- it was around I believe it was Aug or Sept of 2017- and said, “What’s going on you said you were going to review this, where does it stand?” They said they would check and get back with me and I never heard a word from them. And so, if that had been the only red flag, I would still not be the activist that I am today because what proceeded to happen, in that interim period that I just talked to you about, was that the air force had told the state of Michigan that if the state of Michigan adopted a standard that was below the 70 parts per trillion number, and it was applicable-and if the standard were applicable to every in the state- not just you know, singling out the military, that the military would comply with it in Oscoda. Seemed reasonable. DD: Uh-hmm TS: Except they subsequently found out in April of 2017 that Michigan had a standard for, for groundwater, surface water- groundwater, surface water standard of 12 parts per trillion for PFOS which is quite a bit below 70, right? And I also found out that in Oscoda, which is, we are on Lake Huron- the shores of Lake Huron- but my lake is within walking distance of Lake Huron- it’s to the east of the base. To the south of the base is the Au Sable River. My lake is a part of a river system, so it connects with the Au Sable and then flows into Lake Huron. So, we have my lake, we have a river, we have national forests everywhere, and the bays. That’s pretty much Oscoda. There’s a few little businesses around town, but that’s pretty much Oscoda. There’s trees, the air force base, and water. And so, I discovered that the air force was violating, or likely violating, that 12 parts per trillion standard over miles. Miles of the Au Sable River and my lake. And so, I found this out at a meeting, um, a geologist named Bob Delaney who had, people who are studying PFAS, they should know his name because he’s a really important person in that whole process. And Bob and I subsequently became friends. He is one of my heroes in life, he’s a marvelous marvelous human being. He was managing the Oscoda project at the time and at a public meeting- before the meeting you could talk with people one on one- he had a map on the desk that showed all these red dots all along the lake and all along the river and I asked him- and I could see it was4 �it said, “Exceedances of 12 parts per trillion.” And I looked at him and I said, “Why 12, where does that come from?” And he said, “Well, we have a standard.” And I said “You’ve got to be kidding me. We have a standard, why haven’t I been hearing about this? And if we have a standard, then-” And I said, “Does it apply to everybody?” And he said, “Yes it applies to everybody.” And I said, “Well then, they have to comply with it.” Well, from there, the state of Michigan act- really did not want to enforce it. Um, the air force claimed it didn’t apply. That itDD: Hmm TS: They raised this just bologna argument. And we were in this whole- then- game. State of MI was concerned in my view- remember we’re still in the- under the regime that brought us the Flint Water Crisis in 2017. Very concerned about impacts on the businesses- and the Wolverine thing hadn’t hit yet. And, so, once it became apparent that there was this issue that could impact- that would have an impact beyond Oscoda- the state melted like hot butter. Literally. There were- there were people in the state government who were telling people in Oscoda, “That standard did not apply,”- in Oscoda. And they were just dead wrong. Now I’m a lawyer okay, and so I- after hearing this for months and months and months, finally I’m saying “Alright, there’s a way to find this out.” You know- you read the law and you, you check it out. And sure enough, and the- good regulators, Bob Delaney being the prime one, was saying “Absolutely it applies. I’ve been enforcing this for years for all sorts of other chemicals. Absolutely it applies.” Well, I looked it up, had some help from a legal researcher that I worked with and pretty simple and pretty straight forward it applies. The permanent environmental quality referred the issue to the attorney general’s office- they had been enforcing this issue for all these other chemicals for decades. And all of a sudden they didn’t know if it applied here because the air force was putting pressure on them and there was clearly pressure coming from other places. And then- ok so my suspicion meter starts going way up, as you can imagine. DS: Ah hmm. TS: And as all this is then happening- 2017 was really a pretty- it was kind of a turning point yearbecause in the summer we’d learned from Bob Delaney that there were on the base- when the base closed up in 1993 I believe- and there were fire hydrants that were left to- just turned off on the base, there was a water system that was shut off. Bob being the inquisitive guy that he is, thought to himself, “There’s still water in those water hydrants from when that base closed.”And so we can get an idea of what people who lived on the base were drinking from wells on the base were consuming at the time. DD: Hmm… TS: So he did the study…. He is- he- he’s a hero in this thing, and in early 2018 it came out that they were drinking just astronomical levels of PFAS. Just off the charts, crazy. So that hit, and then in, the summer of 2017, we had been seeing this foam on [unclear name of lake] and I- it… in your project, I hope that you can- I’m happy to share you pictures of this, because when you see it, it is shocking and it is alarming, and it just- It’s bad. And so, in the summer of 2017, Bob and his crew were out doing some sampling. They took some highschool kids - it's an incredible story. They took some highschool kids with them from a - science, research, you know- project from school, and they were there was a beach on [unclear lake name] that they were doing the testing on. And the kids said to them, “Hey, have you ever tested that foam?” and they said, “No”. And they really- the mindset was- well foam, you see foam on lakes right? DD: Mhm… 5 �TS: The mindset was [unclear speaking] as an accommodation to the kids, they tested the foam. DD: Wow… TS: The foam- the first test came back at 2,200 parts per trillion of PFOA in the foam. DD: [long sigh] TS: So- and I see you sighing, but it… it gets even worse because after they did that study, after they did that test. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services issued a public advisory saying that that foam was safe to eat, that you could ingest it, even children! And I saw that, and again I could- I have the article from the Oscoda Press and the HHS says, “Foam is not a harm to human health.” I read that article and I just started thinking, “What is going on here… we can’t enforce our laws, we have this foam on our lake and they’re telling us it’s okay and the whole PBB thing starts to come back. Because in PBB they were telling people, “Oh, no big deal, your farmers, your cattle are dropping dead but that’s not a problem, just keep eating the meat- and you just need to feed them more food”. And they would feed them more food and the cattle would get more sick, and the farmers would get sick! Then they told the farmers it was all in their heads, that it was a psychosoma- so, I’ve been down this road before, and it turns out, some… some of these things are so- almost happen [?] for a reason. About a week after that story was in the newspaper, my wife and I are out kayaking on the lake, this was in August of 2017, beautiful day on the lake and we made an agreement we weren’t gonna be talking about PFAS that day, it was our wedding anniversary, and we’re not gonna talk PFAS. So, we’re out kayaking and our lake- this lake is a big lake, it’s about 5-6 miles long and about a mile across. So we’re out kayaking and my wife said, “Hey look, there’s a bunch of guys in moon suits and stuff over on the beach, looks like they’re doing some testing.” and this was a good- probably about a half-mile away from where we were so we have a little bit of a paddle to get there and she said, “Lets go over and see what they’re doing.” And I said, “Well you said no PFAS today” and she said “Yeah well I think we should go''. So, over we went, and of course there was foam on the beach and um… I talked to one of the people who was taking the samples and I said, “Are you- are you testing the foam?” and they said, “Yes'' and I said, “Boy, the 2,200 parts per trillion- I saw that story that- it was really alarming to me.” And he looked at me in a moment of unguarded honesty and said, “We’ve got em way higher than that.” And I said, “Well how high?” And then he said, “Well look, I just take the samples, I don’t work for the state, I'm a contractor. We just give them to the state and they do with- you know whatever they do with it when we give them this stuff.” So, here I am. I know that they have way high numbers, I don’t know what they are. I know that there’s- I’m… I’m very concerned that this advisory that they’ve given is- bad, and I’m the only one who knows this part about the other test results, and I’m trying to think, “What do I do?” On the night of, Friday night of Labor day weekend, my wife was looking at her IPhone and she said, “Hey we got an advisory from the lake association that says, now they’re saying you shouldn’t eat the foam.” And what they did was very interestingly done, they sent the advisory at 8 o’clock on a Friday night of Labor day weekend, not a time where people are paying attention to the news. In the news business- I used to be a reporter in my prior life, we call this a Friday news dump. So they had issued this press release and they said, “We had more test results, but we need to do more, but out of an abundance of caution you shouldn’t eat the foam, but here’s the thing about foam” this little brochure that foam is naturally occurring and blah blah blah. So I thought, “Okay? Now what’s going on.” The health department comes up to have a meeting with our lake association, which I couldn’t attend. I had a wedding out of town that night. They come up, and they don’t even discuss the fact that they issued- that they retracted their initial statement and issued a new one. And I’m thinkin’, “Okay… there is something really strange going on here.” Like, really strange… And so I thought, “What am I gonna do.” Well, I know this guy Delaney, right? So I’ll give him a call. So I did, I called Bob, and I didn’t know- I knew him a little, I didn’t know him super well at the time and I said, “Do you have those test results?” And he said, “Yeah I have them”. And I said, 6 �“Would you give them to me? '' And he thought, from when he paused and he said, “You’re a taxpayer, you paid for these so I’ll give them to you.” So he sent me, ugh, hundreds and hundreds- Dani, I mean probably two feet- when I printed them all there was probably two feet of documents. And so, imagine, I know virtually nothing about science. DD: [Dani laughs] TS: I’m sitting in my office one night, and I have these things stacked up and I’m thinking, “Oh… I gotta go through these…” So I started fumbling through them and, um… the numbers, and I- I didn’t know if I knew how to read them correctly or- I thought I did, but I didn’t know for sure. The numbers that are popping off the pages are really alarming. Like, in the tens of thousands of parts per trillion. So, I’m thinkin I gotta make sure I get this right, exactly right. So I- I summarize- and there’s only, I don’t know maybe ten, or six, or eight, or half a dozen samples and there was a lot of junk that goes around the stuff that goes around it. So I wrote the numbers down, and I called Bob back up. I was very mindful that I did not want to get Bob in troubleDD: Mhm… TS: So I knew that the state was really really sensitive about Oscoda because of the whole Flint mess, so I said, “Look, I’m not gonna ask you to send me test results and say “Hey Tony these are the numbers” or anything, I just- I wanna tell you what I found, and I want you just to verify that I’m right or tell me that I’m wrong.” So I read him the numbers and he said, “Yeah you’re right.” And I said, “Well, those are really big numbers…” 48,000 parts per trillion, and… um… he said to me- if you were still working for the state I wouldn’t say this now but I can because he’s not working there, he said, “Yeah, it’s really scary.” And I said, “What were they thinking?” He said, “I don’t know what they’re thinking.” So my- the red- the red flags are popping up everywhere for me at this point, and I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, now what? What am I gonna do? He’s giving me this information, he’s probably going to get in trouble for giving me this information. If I take this to my neighbors, they’re gonna go, “Well who are you?” right?”. Which is what happened! They said, “Well where did you get these? And why isn’t- why are we hearing about this from you and not the health department?” And I’m saying, “Well that’s the question we need to ask here folks. This is going on right under our nose, and they’re not sharing the information with us. Right?” So… as the time goes- the timeline moves forward- this was early September when I talked- had this discussion with Bob in 2017. I learned that there were more results coming. DD: Hm… TS: And so, I said to Bob, “Will you give me the new ones when they come in?” and he said, “Well I’m not allowed to do that.” I had a hunch he was not gonna- “You need to talk to the Health Department to try to get them.” So, I did find out that they got the results back in late September, and I started emailing the Health Department- state health department, asking for them. No response… In late October of 2017, big sticky piles of foam came right up over our seawall and plopped in our backyard. Very clearly PFAS foam. My son took pictures, Bob Delaney advised me to report it to their environmental emergency hotline, which I did and it was a complete waste of time, because they didn’t- they basically told me don’t worry it’ll go away, and I said, “Well it’s gonna go into the groundwater” which we drink- um… and still no test results. I asked for the test results again, a fourth time, on the day of that and I said, “Look, this is not an academic exercise here, this is going on in my backyard right now.” Nothing. Now, fast forwardrewind back just a couple of weeks to mid October of 2017. Bob Delaney and I had begun a dialogue. He calls me one night, and he said, “You probably don’t know this but I wrote a report in 2012, a comprehensive report about Oscoda and all of Michigan, and nothing really happened with it, and I’m going on the radio tomorrow to make it public.” And I remember 7 �thinking- well the first thing I said to him was, I said, “Are you scared? Because I would be if I were in your shoes, and I just wanna thank you for sticking up for me and my family when nobody else seemedseems to care much.” So he went on the radio- a radio program in Lansing, Michigan, uh… it was Wolverine- was hitting at that point, and he disclosed that he had authored a ninety-some page report with a toxicologist from Colorado titled, “Michigan’s Contaminant Reduced Health Crisis”, and he predicted everything that has happened in Michigan and across the country on PFAS. He was a visionary all the way back in 2012, and he had documented scientifically all sorts of things. He had taken it to the director of the Department of Environmental Quality, the same director who had presided over the Flint mess. Flint hadn’t happened yet, and it basically got thrown in a pile and nothing happened. There were- there were statements by him that people in Oscoda likely had immensely high levels of PFAS in their blood, and no action was taken to find them or to help them in any way. Still haven’t to this day. When Bob’s report hits the governor’s office, Michigan goes into a panic, because now they’re potentially sitting on another water crisis cover up, and Bob’s life got really miserable, really fast. They began monitoring his phone calls, his emails, his texts, um… people would show up in his office and download everything from his phone. He was forbidden from- he was the guy who was always giving presentations at our meetings. He was forbidden from doing that, and essentially he was frozen out. They couldn’t fire him. DD: Mhm... TS: Because it would have been too politically damaging, and the state and the governor’s office went into um- they went into crisis mode. There were reports out at the time, they in respon- Bob had recommended that the state set up a multi-agency task force and do all these things, just recommendation after recommendation, but all of a sudden, within a matter of weeks, they adopted a whole bunch of his recommendations. Just… all of a sudden. But they were telling us that they couldn’t do it before then because they didn’t have authority to. DD: [Dani chuckles] TS: So nothing happened to gi- to change to give them authority. Oscoda became another Flint for them, because it was the place that brought to the fore the fact that they knew about this crisis and they didn’t act on it. So, they’re whole move in Oscoda was to try to- to sweep Oscoda under the rug. This is all going on, okay? The foam, and this, and um… In early November I really had really reached a breaking point, and so I wrote a letter to the Health Department, and I said to them, “Look, the director of your department was just arraigned in court today, on criminal charges in The Flint Water Crisis. That came because you had public health information that you guys didn’t disclose upon - didn’t disclose or or act upon. That’s happening here, now. You have test results that impact me and you’re not sharing them. I don’t think it’s you personally, I think it’s your bosses, but… remember what’s happening up in Flint. It’s every man and woman for themselves and if you’re covering this up and you’re covering up a health problem, I wouldn’t wanna be in your shoes.” DD: Mhm… TS: Bob Delaney jumps in, because I had copied him on the email, and he says, “I’m not going to be- I’m not going to have any part of this.” He sent me the test results, they came back at over 110,000 parts per trillion. DD: Wow! TS: So we’re in this kind of denial, cover up mode that’s going on there, and on top of all of it the air force is doing nothing to try to clean any of this whole mess up. We have an advisory on 9 miles of the Au Sable River that says don’t eat a single fish, because they are some of the most contaminated fish in 8 �the world. We have this foam in our backyard, we have- I mean it’s… it’s really getting bad. And so, I decided to write the governor’s office, and I asked them to come- there was a meeting in early December of 2017, and I asked them to come to the meeting, because I said this is a big problem. I outlined the issue with this- it’s called Rule 57. With that issue, with the fact that we’re having foam, the fact that we’re having all these problems and the state wasn’t doing anything about it. Well sure enough the governor’s office came. They were- they were worried. Dani, on the day that they came, it was early December of 2017, my wife and I were in Oscoda for that and she woke up before I did and she said, “Hey, it snowed last night.” I remember thinking, “I didn’t hear that it was supposed to snow.” So I looked out and said, “I don’t think that’s snow…” So I walked down to the water’s edge, and its- it is the worst looking PFAS foam, to that point in time, that I had ever seen and it was everywhere. It was for miles up and down the lake. I started taking pictures, and I remember thinking to myself, “Okay, what am I gonna do with these?” I really haven’t engaged with the community, but this has gotten to the point where I can’t just pretend and sit back and not do something. So, I took it upon myself to send the pictures to some news reporters. The Detroit Free Press and Garrett Ellison, Keith [?] at the Detroit Free Press and Garrett Ellison from MLive were two of the reporters. They saw those pictures- they were so horrible. Garrett and Keith called me within minutes. Literally within minutes, they clearly dropped whatever they were doing and said, “What’s going on?” So I’m in a position of thinking, “Okay, what am I gonna do?” I was asked to go- to meet with some other people in Oscoda, who are getting concerned. So, I went to this meeting, and I said, okay, everybody is starting to complain. They're seeing the phone. The word about the phone is starting to get out. Bob had allowed me to get the word out to people in a way that they would understand it and could believe that it was accurate. He and I basically wrote him an email and said, I think these are the numbers. I understand the state is not doing anything. Can you verify and he basically just said “yes” to everything so I could show people that, yes, this wasn't just me making this stuff up. So, I went to this meeting and there were, I don't know, a dozen or so people, some businesspeople, some folks who lived in the community. And I said, look, I've got these pictures. You guys have seen the phone today, and they said, oh, yeah, it's terrible, it's awful. I said, look, I don't want to be the out-of-town crusader here, so I want to know. I'm happy to share these, I'm happy to move forward, but I'm not going to do it by myself. And so, we went around the room and it wasn't just about the pictures as well. Are we going to get together? Are we going to do something as a group? And, it was a very poignant discussion that I really will never forget, because one by one by one, they all said, in varying forms, “we've set back and trusted our government for now seven years and look what it's gotten us. Look around, it's visible, you can't miss it. So, that hasn't worked. So, yeah, we're with you. We're in this together.” And so, I talked to the reporters. They ran stories, but more importantly, a group called Need Our Water was formed that day, at that meeting. And, it has now become the first, I don't want to say the first, but it's certainly the most organized and powerful PFAS group in Michigan. And, probably one of the most organized and powerful in the whole country. We're recognized from all over the place. It happened that day. That night, the state officials flew in from Lansing and they flew, and they had to land — the flight path was right over the lake during the day so they could see the foam from the air, that's how bad it was. So, I stood up at the meeting and basically addressed the representative from the governor's office in a very reasonable way and just said, “look, when this all came down, I really thought you guys were doing a good job. But, over the course of the last year plus, I've come to see that that's not the case. To understand that we have this foam that's everywhere, that is not safe. You'll get the pictures, you saw it this afternoon, and I find out that the state is doing nothing about it. I find out that the state has regulations on the books that it's not even enforcing.” And, this just keeps going on and on and on and on. And it was a very interesting thing to watch the reaction of the governor's office representative because you could see her face just dropped. It was probably about a five-minute presentation that I made, and she looked at me very sincerely and said, “you have raised very serious concerns.” So, from there, this group, Need Our Water was hatched, and we started to become quite active. 9 �Right around that time in December, I happened to meet a legislator introduced through a mutual friend. Her name is Winnie Brinks. Name might ring a bell with you, from the Grand Rapids area. She was a state representative at the time, and as of this recording, she's a state Senator and met with Winnie and met with my father, because my father had done the legislation on PBB, and we talked to her about legislation on PFAS and there were some others involved in the meeting as well. From that meeting, the first PFAS legislation in Michigan was introduced by then Representative Brinks to set a drinking water standard for PFOA and PFOS. The legislation got nowhere in the legislature at the time, but it was the start. It was the start of a process that has made PFAS a pretty big statewide issue today, politically and otherwise. And it's really something for me to have seen that happen, because I remember thinking, “I'm in this little, tiny town of Oscoda. We have no news media. Nobody really, really cares as much. How are we going to get this out? Because we can't do this by ourselves.” And, of course, Wolverine remains a very big issue in the Grand Rapids area. So, there's a kinship between our two communities, which you can understand. Because we were the first, Wolverine was the second, and they helped to really pop the issue on the stage with Bob Delaney and the rest. We also happen to have in Oscoda, a congressman by the name of Dan Kildee, who represents Flint. We're in the same district as Flint. I don't think that's going to last much longer than the reapportionment, but he knows all about water crises, and he became an incredible ally for us in the United States Congress. And he came up and he brainstormed with us. We had a brainstorming session in early 2018, and I remember I sat next to him, and I said, “we've got to do something there. I know that there are other communities like ours around the country. They're coming, right?” “We didn't know at the time because we didn't have the testing. “They're coming and we've got to join together because taking on the Pentagon, the armed forces is a pretty hard thing to do, and they don't want to work with us.” So, he said “yeah, it's tough because people don't like to make a big deal out of this issue sometimes because it creates negative publicity,” and yes, it does. There are people in my community who are not happy with me and others in our group because we're a tourism town, right? And, so negative publicity about the water and the fish and the deer, which there's advisories for all of those, is not a good thing for tourism. So, he left, and things went on. As it turns out, as a result of that meeting, he credits that meeting with giving him the idea to form what is now known as the Bipartisan Congressional PFAS Taskforce, a group of members of Congress who come together solely around the PFAS issue. I believe, as of today, that there are somewhere in the 80 to 90 range, 80 to 90 members of Congress, who are a part of this PFAS coalition. Which is incredibly cool when you think it all started in little old Oscoda, and now we have 90 members of Congress. I went up to Washington, D. C. in the fall of 2018 to a hearing that Senator Peters convened, Gary Peters. And, I know my way around Washington a little, because I was involved in politics with my father, and met with some members of Congress and their staffs to talk about our plate in Oscoda. And it was very interesting, most people hadn't heard of PFAS, didn't know if they had, they just heard very very little about it. So, it became apparent to me, “okay, we've got to do some education here.” I connected with the campaign of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She wasn't the governor then, she was a state senator, a former state senator. Actually, this was earlier in the year. And I said, “hey, you really want to get to know about this issue.” So, she came to Oscoda, and she met with us. We were the first ones to tell her about PFAS. And it was a meeting where she just sat and listened, to take it all in because she didn't know about it. At the same time, somebody introduced me to a woman who was running for Attorney General. Her name is Dana Nessel, and she is now our Attorney General. And, Attorney General Nessel at the time said, “hey, you got a lot of knowledge about this. Do you mind if I pick your brain?” then I said, “absolutely.” And so, during her campaign, I advised her and worked with her in helping to kind of to formulate her positions on PFAS. It became one of her probably top three issues in her election campaign for Attorney General. And, she won. And, I can tell you an incredible story about that in a minute. But, my notion of what I had learned from PBB was that until it became a political issue, until it got moved, until the 10 �bureaucrats were forced by the political forces to take action, that nothing happened with that. And, I saw that going on here as well. So, I was like, “we’ve got to educate politicians, we’ve got to educate elected officials, we’ve got to educate candidates in this issue. I think it’s going to be a big one.” And it turns out, it was a big one, it has been a big one. So, the story about the Attorney General, so she gets elected, of course. Her first day in office she calls me, and she says, “get up here, we're going to talk about PFAS.” And, up I go to Lansing. She was so new, that her staff was just getting put in place. I show up at the building, and they won’t let me in. The security guard says, “who are you here to see?” and I said, “well I am here to see the Attorney General.” And they said, “well who in the Attorney General’s office do you have an appointment with?” And I said, “well I have an appointment with the Attorney General.” And they said “yeah, but who in the Attorney General’s office do you have an appointment with?” and I said, “the Attorney General Dana Nessel.” “Well, who is the staff person that set the appointment up?” I said “there wasn’t a staff person, it was the Attorney General. And, I said let me tell you, I can imagine you have all sort of people wandering in and out of the street here that would like to talk to the attorney general about all sorts of grievances they have. I am not crazy, I’m not a whacko, I really do have an appointment with the Attorney General. Would you please just call somebody up there? I don’t know who to tell you to call, other than the Attorney General, but call somebody in her office. And, they can verify that I’m for real.” So, sure enough, he looked at me and said, “yeah, I’ll be darn, you’re right” [chuckles]. So up I go! And we talked about different legal things that we could do. My legal background has been helpful, and I give her all the credit in the world that she followed through on the promises she made. The main one being that she’s going to sue the chemical manufacturers. 3M and others, and that was done, that’s going on, that’s in process today. People see this someday they’re going to know how it turned out. That was a real tangible result of being organized, and being engaged, and being involved, and that felt good. As you can imagine. It doesn’t feel good that my community still 12 years later, 11 years later doesn’t have a clean-up plan in place, it doesn’t feel good when people in my community who feel a sense of alienation, who feel that they’ve been abandoned by their government, who feel there’s no hope, who are suffering from various malities which we can’t even get confirmed, they won’t even be tested to see if they connected to…. It’s such a non validating, that’s a terrible word, but a non validating process to go through. To have bureaucrats continuously tell you “It’s no big deal, not a problem” and you know there is. And, it t continues to play out, all across the United States. In the course of my work, I continued getting involved with a group called the National PFAS Contamination Coalition. Which is a coalition of community groups, like ours in Oscoda, now in 40 communities and 17 states across the country. Our experiences are very, very, very similar. Their differences from community to community, you could in many many ways almost change the names and change the locations and its very similar stuff that’s going on. We’ve developed a bond, with people who have gone through this. It’s almost a brother and sisterhood kind of thing. I thought when I was involved with PBB that I was really with it, into it. I mean I was as close as you could get to what was going on. It’s not the same as when it happens to you. When it happens to you, it never goes away. It’s always there. And, particularly I see this in moms. A sense of guilt that they have, unintentionally, poisoned their children. Of course, it’s not their fault, they didn’t know. But it’s something they live with. I’ve talked to moms in particular with children who have been born with serious developmental issues and birth defects, it's just gut wrenching. And sadly, the bureaucrats who are largely in charge of this response, don’t understand that human side. I can see you do because I can see you getting upset just talking to me, but they don’t get it! For them, it’s like a big science experiment, and sadly the guinea pigs are all of us. With PFAS, it isn’t just people in Oscoda, or people in Kent County, or people in these little dots you keep seeing popping up across the map. PFAS is so prevalent that it’s everybody. Some people have different reactions than others, there are lower levels in certain places than others, but the research continues to show that low levels, quoteunquote “low levels” are bad, in lots of different ways. And we know they are bad for, particularly harmful for children, fetuses, pregnant women, people with immunological problems, older people. We’re 11 �going to learn more as we go forward, but none of it’s good. I mean, there’s nothing good that comes from any of this. And, as I look back 50 years ago to where I was with PFAS, and where I am today and Dani there have been so many very poignant and moving things that have happened to me. I haven’t even touched on a number of them, but in the process of this, I got to meet the researchers who are doing the PBB study now. We got together in Lansing, there was a PBB/PFAS gathering there. And, we got together, and they said, “hey we should talk.” My dad came, and these researchers are from Emory University in Atlanta, the state of Michigan, by the way, dropped the study in the 1990s. Emory University, for whatever reason, in Atlanta, jumped in and got funding and is continuing it. But, we started a conversation we thought would be maybe a half an hour. As we talked, I think it went for 8 hours, by the time we got done. We were like “well let’s go to dinner.” We went to dinner, and we just kept talking and talking and the stories that they told me about what they’re still seeing today, just tears your heart out. And what I know when I see that, and when I’ve seen what I’ve seen coming down with PFAS, I know that’s what’s going to be in the future for countless untold people. That is just, that’s hard to live with. And, the fact that we have no regulations at the federal level, none, zero, today? The fact that even at the federal level, we are only looking at one or two, in a class of thousands? The fact that the people who told us that PFOA and PFOS were safe are now saying “oh don’t worry, yeah, those are problematic — they still won’t acknowledge them — but all these other 7000 things are fine, because they’re different. Well, no. The good scientists are telling us otherwise. In any event, good research tells you that if you’re really following the science, that’s kind of a term people like to use. The best way to protect public health is to not have this stuff in the environment in the first place. Instead of putting it in the environment, randomly poisoning people, and then going back and trying to do the detective work after the damage is done. So, that was the lesson for me from PBB. Another interesting aside, I went off to college in the PBB thing. I went to Harvard, and I took a class on the science of public policy, on public policy of carcinogenic stuff, and my professors were like “you were involved with this world seminal thing that was going on with PBB? You know these people?” and I was like “yeah I know them.” From the class, I learned about the history of carcinogenic chemicals. There’s bad stuff in a lot of different ways. You’ve got lead out there that affects developmental issues, we’ve just got a cocktails of bad things in our environment. But, one of the things I learned was to study this, to study the impacts, one of the helpful things in epidemiology is to study where the cancers pop up. And then in the detective work go back and say, “oh geez we’ve got a cluster here of a particular type of cancer.” So, my father, at my suggestion, introduced legislation in the 1980s, which was signed into law in 1984, creating the Michigan cancer registry. So, when people die of cancers, without reviewing their private information, the information is kept in a registry. So, we have that. I don’t know that it's being used in the way it should be, for PFAS or really for anything else. But, I have a different view from a lot of people because of what I’ve seen and what I’ve been through. My view of the future, given where we are now, it’s not a particularly bright one. I am sorry to say that, but it’s a reality. And, it’s something that makes the work that I do, in one sense it motivates me in a big way, but in another way, it makes me very sad that it’s such an uphill battle. And it also motivates, I have a grandson now, he’s a year old and I have another one on the way, it’s for them. For us, in a way, it’s too late, but to bring people into the world and know that things like this are out there and we are not taking care of them is just hard to deal with. I suspect we have probably talked longer than you might’ve guessed we would have, or there's certainly more I could share with you. DD: Well, you actually started anticipating one of my questions, which was about ‘what concerns do you have about PFAS contamination going forward?’ I don’t know if you want to say any more about that or not. TS: My concerns moving forward is that they’re creating new PFAS’s at such a rapid rate. New types of PFAS, given the current structure that there’s no way we can keep up. So, if we don’t regulate them as a class, if we don’t ban them, except for the most essential uses, and then require that they prove safety before they can be used in things like cosmetics, and food packaging, and dental floss, and all sorts of 12 �crazy things. If we don’t do that, we're in a bad, bad, bad place. And so, that’s the focus of, aside from getting wordsmith air force base cleaned up, and getting my lake cleaned up, we’ve had some success. My wife says I ruin every party whenever anyone talks to me, but we have had some success. But, the future right now is not particularly bright, without change. The bright part in this —. You live a total downer, the bright side in this is I can’t tell you how many incredibly amazing, compassionate people that I have met across the country who are just as passionate and active and involved as I am. They, as I think I may have alluded to before, we are like blood brothers and sisters. Because we lived this experience and were committed to do this and the stories they have to tell are just very moving and very touching. Many of them, I know in my case, I’ve been in three film documentaries, including one that was done by a Pulitzer Prize winner. The woman who broke the jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal at Penn State came to Oscoda and did a whole production up there. The stories, because like you, she said, “these stories are important, and we have to get them out” and so I think part of the reason I think what you’re doing is so important is we do need to get these stories out. Because they have a very personal side, a very personal impact. 13 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Living with PFAS Interviews Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Devasto, Danielle Description An account of the resource Beginning in 2021, the Living with PFAS interviews were recorded to gather the personal stories of individuals impacted by PFAS contamination. PFAS, or per- and polyflourinated substances, are a large group of human-made chemicals used widely since the 1940s to make coatings and products resistant to heat, oil, stains, grease, and water. They can be found in countless household items, including food packaging, non-stick cookware, stain-resistant furniture, and water-resistant clothing. These chemicals are often called “forever chemicals” because they do not break down easily, can move through soils and contaminate drinking water sources, and build up in animals, plants, and people. PFAS have been linked to increased incidences of various cancers, increased cholesterol, decreased fertility, birth defects, kidney and liver disease, and immune system suppression, and thyroid dysfunction. It is estimated that PFAS are in the drinking water of more than 200 million Americans (Andrews & Naidenko, 2020). In Michigan alone, over 280 sites have PFAS contamination exceeding maximum contamination levels for groundwater (MPART, 2024). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Living with PFAS (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Personal narrative PFAs (Perfluorinated chemicals) Groundwater--Pollution Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DC-11 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Motion Picture Text Sound Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PFAS0028 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Spaniola, Tony Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-09-24 Title A name given to the resource Tony Spaniola, 2021 (Interview video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Tony Spaniola resides in southeast Michigan, but maintains a second home in Oscoda, Michigan near the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. The base was first recorded to have PFAS contamination in 2010, though Tony did not learn of it until reading about it in the newspaper in 2016. In this interview Spaniola discusses the impact that PFAS has had on his and his family's lives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource DeVasto, Danielle (interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Personal narrative PFAs (Perfluorinated chemicals) Groundwater--Pollution Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Living with PFAS (project) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives