War

Narrator, a former sergeant of a rifle platoon, talks about his experiences in WWII.

In this interview, Mr. Cole discusses his early education in Louisville, working for his father�s newspaper the Louisville Leader and describes what it was like to be the child of a prominent figure in the community. He describes his father physically and tempramentally and reflects on attendance at the Louisville Municipal College and urban renewal.

Eunice Brashear Collins describes her family’s long-standing ownership of land at Scuddy (subsequently a coal mining community), Perry County, Kentucky as well as her childhood and youth there in the 1920s and 1930s. Ms. Collins touches on her high school and early employment at nearby Vicco, as well as an early teaching job at Scuddy. In the later recollection, she briefly discusses race conditions in Perry County, including one particularly violent episode. Collins vividly recalls her two years at Alice Lloyd College at Pippa Passes, Kentucky, and the forces that eventually persuaded her to migrate to Louisville as a single woman, where she sought further education and held a series of World War II jobs. That work included employment at the Jeffersonville, Indiana U. S. Army Quartermaster Depot, the Charlestown, Indiana powder plant where she worked on the bagging production line, and finally as a business teacher at a Bowman Field recuperation facility for wounded soldiers. Collins describes how she met Bill Collins, whom she married just before he was shipped out for three years of military service, and the early difficulty he faced in the immediate postwar period when he settled in Louisville. Finally, Eunice describes her educational preparation and career advancement to principal of Chenoweth Elementary School in the old Jefferson County Public Schools and the special role she played in the mid-1970s in a merged system responding to a court-ordered desegregation plan.

An interview about the personal experiences and impressions of the narrator a refugee from South Vietnam.

Veterans History Project

Mr. Detrick was an Army Air Corps pilot during World War II, and was stationed in Burma from 1944-46. His job was to air drop supplies to those soldiers who were building the Ledo Road.

The Diamonds discuss their parents who came to the United States from Latvia; Mrs. Diamond's education at the Louisville Normal School, a two-year teacher's college run by the city; Dr. Diamond's education at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville School of Medicine; recollections of World War II and its impact on the local Jewish community; anti-Semitism in Louisville; and impressions of the nation of Israel, Zionism, and involvement in the local Zionist movement.

Mr. Distler was an Army Air Corps pilot during World War II from 1944- 45. He airlifted supplies over the Himalayas from American bases in India to American bases in China.

An interview with a native Vietnamese about his experiences in Vietnam and his feelings on the war.

Veterans History Project