Where is the Justice?: Second Edition

By William F. Hill

I have always felt that we have greatest country in the world. It has always given me great pleasure to see honest, hardworking people and who are willing to take risks to get ahead and succeed. I always felt that this was that America got to be

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inks and Bindings, LLC
• Release date: Mar 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886150025

William F. Hill

The government did all that they could to destroy us. They never liked that I did business with local banks. I only purchased their delinquent properties that they had already foreclosed on, fixed them up, and resold them.The government was upset with the big house the we built after selling our farm. I helped a number of people purchase homes, and property for themselves. The government didn't like this. They told me that "poor people should stay poor".To get even with me, they accused me of making a false statement on a loan application. I had made no such loan application. I hadn't even been near a bank. Bradford bank, where I had excellent credit, called me and said that they needed to make a loan to another customer who was the president of another bank and was up to his credit limit with them, that he would soon be caught up.I knew both these men and had plenty of respect for both of them. Bradford bank made all the arrangements and made the loan direct. I did have to sign on the note which the bank brought to me. The note was soon paid off directly to the bank.As agreed, I had nothing to do with any part of this and received nothing for my help. I later checked with other banks and several attorneys. They all said that this was what is called a "nominee loan," and was perfectly legal.For this, the government charged me with making a false statement on a loan application which I never made. They called me a felon, which caused me to lose my credibility and my respect. I also lost my real estate licenses and auctioneers license.They threatened to use this against me at sentencing if I refused to lie for them at another's trial. I would not lie for them and they haven't left me alone since.You need to read my book, "Where is the justice", to really see what they did to us, especially my wife Sally.In the mid eighties when our son Ronald got into trouble, who we had only tried to help him and keep good home for us and our family. We knew nothing about the illegal things that he was doing until it was too late.The government took all our property and sold it for only $190 thousand. We had nearly $500 thousand invested. The government was getting the sale money and we were getting nothing.We had done nothing wrong intentionally or never tried to be dishonest. We certainly would not have been working with Ronald if we had any idea that he was doing anything illegal.The government claimed that they knew for at least five years about Ronald, yet they kept quiet and let us fall into this trap so that they could reap a big profit from us while we lost nearly everything that we worked for all our lives very hard. They smashed our doors down and about forty of them trashed our home. Where Is The Justice?It is very sad what has happened to Sally and her family. We always worked very hard and tried to help others get ahead and experience a good life.Although we worked very hard and devoted our lives to helping others, the government, and the Olson's, have no conscience about destroying our lives.Sally is now gone and this is very sad. I hope that these people will someday realize what they have done and how tragic it was.

Book preview

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this book to my family and to the many people who have been very kind to us and helped us through this mess. Also, I would like to dedicate it to the many honest, hardworking people in this country who are struggling to raise their families, get ahead, and make this world a better place to live. I would like for you to make up your own mind, and I would really like to hear from you, the reader, as to your thoughts and your honest opinion about where the justice lies here. You be the jury, which we never had, and we will anxiously await your decision.

PREFACE

I have always felt and thought that here in the United States, we have the greatest country in the world. It has always given me great pleasure to see honest hardworking people and who are willing to take risks to get ahead and succeed. I always felt that this was the way that America got to be great and that we all should be working hard to help improve our own lives and the lives of others by carrying on this great American tradition. As a result of being brought up with this kind of thinking, I have always been more than willing to go out of my way, as many others have, to try to help people succeed and obtain their goals, whether they were already well off or they had nothing but the will to get ahead. To see people succeed in their life’s goals and ambitions has always been very gratifying to me and given me a good feeling. Another thing that always gives me a good feeling is to see couples doing things as a family and with their children. To me this is what life is all about and should be about.

It seems that in the last thirty years or so, there have been a number of people who have showed up, especially in high places, who do not share the same philosophy of life that we were raised with. Many of the new thinking people seem to think that their calling in life is to destroy this system and the kind of life that we have known in this country for so many generations. They feel that it is their duty to keep people from reaching their goals. They don’t want you and me to use our heads, our ingenuity, and hard work to get ahead. They want us to all to have to share our thoughts and ideas with them so that they can shoot them full of holes and make our life more difficult rather than easier and simpler. They are hell-bent to destroy any success genes that we are born with. Many of this new generation of do-gooders, as they are often called, seem to think that everybody should live on handouts and that anyone who is successful should be cut back down and not allowed to succeed without their input as this is not fair to the less fortunate in this country.

What they do not seem to realize or don’t want to realize is that the people who are more successful probably do more to help the less fortunate than all the government and giveaway programs can ever hope to do. A successful person who has obtained his achievements through hard, honest work is usually willing to try to help others reach similar success. A person who is successful usually lives in a little better house. Many now think that this wrong, but that person probably pays several times the property taxes of someone living in a less expensive home. This will benefit everyone as this helps to educate their children and pay for many of the local services that people demand to day. If they hire people to help take care of their homes or properties, they are usually paid for with after tax dollars, and this creates jobs for the people doing the work. Isn’t this sharing the wealth? Most successful people help create jobs either by expanding their own business or investing on other business. I think that in order to get people off welfare and off the government rolls, we need all the successful people that we can get in this country. The government has tried to run and control the way that we live and our destinies and look at the mess that they have created.

As someone once said, As government power grows, our security diminishes. The more power that the government obtains under the disguise of protecting people, the more we should fear the government, and the more the government is going to harass and torment innocent citizens. Most people can endure just about any kind of pain except the pain of injustice, which our own government has imposed on many Americans.

I have always considered myself very lucky in that I have been able to work hard and live the American dream and always felt that I was helping many others to do the same, and I’m grateful to the many people who certainly have helped me. In the past six and a half years, this has all come to a halt. This book is about what has happened to me and my family, about banks and government.

Bill Hill

PO Box 15

Hardwick, Vermont 05843

CHAPTER 1

WHO IS BILL HILL

I was born sixty two years ago, in my parents’ house in Hardwick, Vermont, on April 15, 1935. Perhaps being born on April 15 was not the best omen. Both my parents had grown up on farms in the area. My father’s family had settled about six miles from here in Greensboro, over two hundred years ago. They had been pioneers, clearing the land, farming, and running sawmills and other small businesses. They suffered many hardships in order to survive in Northern Vermont.

To get here, they journeyed several hundred miles to Greensboro with all their cattle, horses, and belongings, from the mouth of the Connecticut River on Long Island Sound. They had to then clear the land, plant crops, cut hay for their livestock, build a house and barn, build fences, roads, and furniture, build a fireplace, and hunt and fish for their food. They had to cope with severe winters’ wild animals, disease, and the threat of Indian visits. There were no stores, doctors, or neighbors nearby, and roads were little more than rough and often muddy paths through deep woods. They later built a sawmill. Other trades that they took up were cobbler, cooper, innkeeper, blacksmith, farmers, carpenters, and operators of a gristmill and a sawmill. One of their mottos was Do your work so men won’t curse you for it after you have gone.

In 1935, the year I was born, my father was getting established in the business of raising potatoes. As soon as I was five or six years old, I started carrying my dinner pail and going to the potato fields with him. While he would work in the potato fields, I would play near the edge of the field, in the woods, and around the toolshed. As I became older, I was able to help more. I always enjoyed being around my dad and working with him. Although we were potato farmers, most of our neighbors were dairy farmers. This was in the early 1940s. Most of the farmers didn’t have tractors but did their work with horses and horse- drawn equipment. We, at that time, had a Farmall model F-12 steel-wheel tractor, which we later traded for a Farmall model H. Through July and August, we mostly sprayed the potato plants to protect them from blight, fungus, aphids, and potato bugs. This was the same time that the other farmers were cutting their hay, drying it, and getting it in the barn for winter feed. Anytime that it looked like rain or a storm coming, we would stop spraying as the rain would only wash the spray off the leaves, so it would be wasted. We would put the tractor and sprayer in the shed then look around to see who had hay down that was ready to go in the barn. Whenever it looked like rain, we always went to help any of our neighbors get their hay in before it got rained on. I liked just about everything about farming, so I always looked forward to this, plus I often got to drive the horses. It always made us feel good to know that we had been able to help our neighbors. A number of times, when someone got hurt or was sick, I remember going with my dad to milk their cows and do their chores for them. As I liked farming, I also enjoyed this very much, and it was a great satisfaction to know that you had helped someone.

In the fall of the year, when it came time to dig the potatoes, we would hire forty to fifty people to pick potatoes, and this took about five or six weeks. We would put them in storage in a large building that we called the potato house then spend most of the winter grading them, bagging them, and selling them. Although potato digging was a lot of hard work with long days, I found it very exciting as there were a lot of people around and plenty going on.

Our town had a central school building called Hardwick Academy and Graded School. This one building housed all twelve grades. There were several one-room schools in the rural areas that taught grades one through six or eight. Then if these student wanted to go high school, they had to make their own way to Hardwick Academy. We lived about a mile from the academy school building, so I attended all twelve grades in this one school building. There was no school transportation in those days, so I walked to school in the morning home to dinner and back at noon and then home again at night. This made a little over four miles a day.

My first brother, Steve, was born the fall that I started the first grade. About five years later, my second brother, Jim, was born, and my younger brother, Dan, was born the fall that I started in the ninth grade.

About the time that I started school, my dad took on a second business as a grain distributor for a farmers coop. At that time all the farmers ordered their grain ahead and it came in railroad cars that were parked on the local rail siding. We would notify all the farmers when the grain came in and they would come to the rail siding to pick up their orders. All the grain was in one hundred pound burlap bags. They could also order pastry flour, bread flour gram flour and oat meal in twenty five pound bags. We had three locations where we unloaded, in Hardwick, East Hardwick and Greensboro Bend.

At that time there were several trains a day. There were freight trains mail trains, passenger trains, and a milk train that went through every afternoon picking all the milk cars at all the creameries, which were all located on rail sidings. Each one of these freight yards where we unloaded were very busy places and bustling with activity, as nearly everything came or went by rail in those days. All the engines ran on steam and burned coal. At the Greensboro location there were large coal sheds and a water tower where the engines fueled up. There were creameries at all the locations where all the local farmers brought their milk every morning. The Hardwick area had several granite quarries and stone sheds. Nearly all the granite was loaded on to rail cars for shipment. Also loaded at these sidings were pulp wood, lumber, hay, Christmas trees and anything else that got shipped. Often as soon as we emptied a grain car the Renaud boys or somebody would start loading it with pulp or lumber. Many other supplies came in by rail and were unloaded, new cars, farm machinery, stock for the local merchants, and all the mail.

Not far from the siding in Hardwick was a favorite swimming hole in the Lamoille River. Every afternoon in the summer all the kids in the village would show up there either on foot or with their bicycles to cool off and take a swim.

Around two o’clock, the East Hardwick Creamery, which manufactured powdered milk, and was about three miles upstream, would dump thousands of gallons of skim milk and wash water into the river. This would turn the river white, and when it came down by the swimming hole, most everybody would get out for about twenty minutes while it went by and the water cleared again. Today nobody even swims in the river.

Around 1945 the grain business was going good and had expanded to include fertilizer and other farm supplies. My dad bought a large old building on Wolcott Street from Mrs. Utley where her husband Charles had operated a grain and general store before his death. This building had a rail siding, which was a spur off the St. J. & LC, which was the main line. This spur was part of the old Hardwick Woodbury line that had gone up into Woodbury years earlier to bring the granite from the quarries to the local stone sheds. After that we unloaded most of our grain and farm supplies at this location and the farmers could come and pick up what they wanted anytime. We also delivered a lot or grain. Many of the village people kept a milk cow, chickens, pigs, or horses, so this was very convenient for them.

During the winter months many of the farmers would sit around the wood stove in the office of the feed store to exchange stories and gossip, we always knew what was going on as they all loved to talk about their neighbors as well as themselves. We didn’t need a newspaper.

I liked being around the feed store and the potato fields helping out when I wasn’t in school. I also worked for several neighbors shoveling snow, helping them with their haying, tending horses and other livestock. We also had a small chicken house where I kept a couple of dozen laying hens and I sold the eggs around the neighborhood.

When I was about eight, I had saved a few dollars so my dad took me with him to Caledonia National Bank in Danville, where he did his banking and I started a savings account. I was really fascinated with the bank. It was a brick building and as you went in the front door to the lobby there was a steel door, on the left, with a small window that had what looked like chicken wire in the glass. Next was the teller’s windows, which were covered with bars. The lobby had a very high ceiling so the inside walls did not go clear to the ceiling but instead had several electric wires running along the top to keep anyone from climbing over them. I felt that my money should be safe here. To open an account we had to go into the little room with the glass window but not until the man on the inside pushed a buzzer, which unlocked the door. I learned later that Caledonia Bank had been robbed back in the thirties by a well-known famous bank robber named Eddy Bentz.

When I was a kid, a man was judged by how hard he worked, how well he paid his bills and how well he provided for his family. My father preached those virtues to us many times. Also there was no substitute for honesty; a man’s word was his bond. Whenever I got in to a squabble with my brothers, Dad would always bring up the golden rule, which states, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We were also taught to be thrifty. We learned to take care of what we had and not waste anything. We didn’t leave the lights on that we were not using. When we worked in the woods, we were taught to be careful not knock down and injure the trees that you weren’t cutting. As we were farmers, we were taught how to protect the soil against erosion and it was our job to make the world a better place in which to live I have never forgotten those lessons.

When I was about twelve or thirteen, my dad bought another farm to raise potatoes on. There were about one hundred twenty acres a house a hen house and a cow barn with an upstairs stable. It also had a milk house with a milk cooler and there was a McCormick Deering milking machine. About the only other equipment was a Farmall model F-12 steel-wheel tractor, that you had to hand crank to start and a Sam Daniels horse drawn manure spreader that had been converted over to go behind the tractor.

I was really excited about this as this was the first time that we had actually had a farm with a cow barn and a place to keep chickens. This farm was about three and a half miles from where we lived in the village so I could walk there after school or anytime that I wanted to. I immediately started working extra hard and using my money to buy some dairy calves and chickens. The old steel-wheel tractor wasn’t used much in the potato business so I used it around the farm. One thing that I did was team up with John Rowell a neighbor kid whose family had two horse drawn mowing machines. We cut the pole off one of these machines and rigged it to go behind the tractor. We mowed our hay their hay and then we worked out mowing some of the neighbors hay to make a few dollars. We took turns swapping off driving the tractor and riding on the mowing machine. We could mow hay more than twice as fast as the other farmers could with their horses. We also used the tractor to get out some pulp wood, which we sold.

Within a couple of years, I had several heifers ready to calve and start producing milk. My dad saw that I was serious about milking cows although I was still only about fourteen years old. He purchased a few more cows and I took care of them. As we lived about three and a half miles from the farm, he would help me in the mornings. We would get up at four o’clock, eat breakfast and go to the farm do the morning chores then take our milk to the creamery and be back home by seven so that he could go to work and I could go to school. In the afternoon after school I would walk home from school, change my clothes then walk to the farm to do the milking and the rest of the chores then walk back home. Often on the way home it was after dark and was hard to see and follow the road.

We did not use the farmhouse so he had rented it out for twenty dollars a month. One very cold Saturday in January I walked up to do the morning chores. We did not have running water in the cow stable so we had to let the cows out into the barn yard to drink out of a tub that we kept covered to keep from freezing. We had to uncover the water tub and often had to chop the ice with an axe so that the cows could drink. This morning I had let the cows out and cleaned the stable. It was very cold, so I worked fast to try to keep warm and to keep from shivering. I went into the hay barn to pitch down some hay when I noticed that I no longer was cold or shivering, but was starting to get dizzy and everything started to look fuzzy. I staggered back out through the stable and into the barn yard where I fell down. I made my way over to the barn yard fence and pulled myself up. About that time, Dick Pearson the man who rented the house saw me and came over to see what was wrong. He helped me to the house. They had a big round oak wood stove in the living room. I can remember him telling me to go and sit in the chair next to the stove, but by that time I couldn’t see either the stove or the chair or anything else. He finally helped me to the chair. The heat felt good and I immediately began to feel better as I warmed up. After a little while, I no longer felt dizzy, I could see all right and I felt fine again. I got up went back to the barn finished my chores, put the cows back in and walked home. It was still very cold but I felt fine. From this experience I realize that freezing to death could be very easy but I don’t think it would be very painful.

On my sixteenth birthday I got my driver’s license. This made things much handier and a lot easier to get back and forth.

I was not an especially good student as I was much more interest in farming and working than I was in school. Math and science came fairly easy but subjects like English and social studies were not my favorite. At no time in high school did I plan to go on to college so I didn’t worry about which courses were necessary to get into college. I took several agriculture and shop classes as this was much more interesting to me. I could not wait to graduate from High school so that I could devote full time to farming. After graduation, I worked hard on the farm hoping to expand and make this my life’s work.

My mother wanted me to go to college, which I had no interest in. She brought up the subject several times. I explained to her that I had neither the right courses, credits, nor grades needed to get into college. She was not one to give up easily. She kept insisting that it wouldn’t do any harm for me to apply. I knew that this met a lot to her so I applied at the University of Vermont. When the reply came back, it stated that I could not be accepted for all the reasons that I just mentioned, but that if I wanted to I could take an entrance exam that might still let me in if I did well on it. There again wanting to please my mother I agreed to go and take the exam. When the reply came, this time, it stated that I had done very well in the math and science categories but not so well in some the others and to my surprise they had decided to accept me.

By now I knew that it would be very disappointing to her if I didn’t go, so I went down and enrolled in the college of agriculture at the University of Vermont. At that time I think that the tuition for Vermont students was $178 per semester but you had to pay for your room and meals. You also had to furnish your own books and supplies but we had to do that in high school back in those days.

Going to college meant that I had to get rid of my cattle and poultry for the time being. When I got into the swing of college, I really liked it and made up my mind that I was going to get the most out of it that I could. Studying was not one of my strong points so I had to really work at it. I came home nearly every weekend and helped with the potatoes and grain business. At the end of my freshman year I was selected as one of two agriculture students from Vermont with a farm background to attend a leadership camp in Michigan. The camp was owned, sponsored and paid for by William Danforth, the founder of the Ralston Purina Company. He had invited two students from each of the fifty states to attend this conference. I felt honored to be one of them.

The rest of the summer months I worked around the potatoes and the grain business plus cutting and putting up the hay on the farm. One year I worked in the woods cutting logs for my father. We cut them with a two man cross cut saw and skidded them out with horses. We then rolled them on to an old ford truck and took them to a local sawmill. A couple of winters on Saturdays I developed a route delivering and selling potatoes to restaurants and ski resorts. One summer I went to Troy Ohio to a welding school at the Hobart welding factory.

While at the college of agriculture I took all the dairy cattle courses that they had. I also got to know many of the top cattlemen around the country. A couple of times I took the job of fitting a string of show cattle for some well-known farms then showing at places like Essex and Rutland Fair, and the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield Mass.

While in my junior year, another student and I were asked to put on an exhibit to promote Vermont Dairy products at the New England Governors’ Conference, which was being held at the Statler Hotel in Boston. We decided to take two cows to Boston and keep them in the lobby of the hotel and to feed and milk them there. We got a clearance from everybody necessary. We pulled into Boston around 11:00 at night and I backed up to the front door of the Statler Hotel with a cattle truck. I think that we must have caused one of the biggest traffic jams in the city in a long time. People were coming from everywhere to see what was going on, and cars and taxi cabs were backed up everywhere. Next thing I knew there were TV cameras all over the place. We kept the cows at the Statler for around three days. We took a canvas tarp and put it on the lobby rug then covered it with shavings and straw then used three steel gates to make a double start leaving the back open so that people could get closer to the cows if they wanted to. It caused a lot of excitement and was a lot of fun. One thing that was especially amusing was to see some salesman who had obviously come from the bar late at night staggering into the lobby and see those cows there. They would rub their eyes, take another look, then rub their eyes and look again in disbelief as to what they were seeing. One man got so startled that he fell down the stairs.

The summer of 1957 between my junior and senior year I took my real estate brokers exam and got a brokers’ license. I also went to the Reisch Auction School in Mason City, Iowa. This was a two week course but very intense. The classes started at seven in the morning and went until eleven at night.

About a week before I was to graduate from the university, I started getting calls from insurance agents who wanted to make an appointment to sell me insurance. I’m sure that were contacting all the graduates. They all insisted that the first thing that I was going to need was a good life insurance policy. They were all very persistent and wouldn’t take no for an answer. In one of our farm management classes they had warned us about insurance salesmen. Finally instead of trying to discourage them when they called I made an appointment with each one for the next Wednesday at ten o’clock at my apartment, which was down town in an old block upon the third floor and way at the end of the long winding narrow hall. I think that there were either twenty four or twenty six different salesmen that were planning to show up on Wednesday. I moved out on Tuesday and went back home. They must have had an insurance man’s convention up in that narrow hall.

This was probably a dirty crick to play on them, but they would not take no for an answer and I couldn’t see that this was any worse than making an appointment with each one individually and taking up much more of their time and mine while they each tried to convince me to buy their insurance, which I had no intention of buying and was not interested in.

During my senior year of college, my dad who was only fifty two was not feeling well. He had always been a very honest and conscious hardworking man, but a very poor book keeper although he was good with figures. He kept many things in his head rather than writing them down. When a customer bought a load of potatoes, he would write the amount on the wall in the potato house. At income tax time he would have to rub the dust off the wall and add up his figures. The Hardwick town clerk who did his income taxes for him and always said that he paid more tax than he would if he had a better book keeping system. IRS was starting to pressure him to produce records that he didn’t have. This was really bothering him as he felt that they didn’t trust him. After college, I was still determined to go back home to farm and to help my dad so as to take some of the pressure off him. I knew that he was getting discouraged. That spring the Town of Hardwick had a steel and concrete bridge over the Lamoille River that they wanted to rebuild. They wanted to break out all the old cement and replace the floor with corrugated steel decking then black top over it. They also wanted to lower one end of the bridge so that it wouldn’t be so steep when you drove off the bridge down onto the street. I owned portable welding equipment and a bulldozer, so I decided to bid on the job. I thought that this would be a good way to make some money to help me get started back in farming. I got the job so I hired my brother Steve and a couple of other young fellows and went at it. I worked long hours as I didn’t want this job to take any more time than necessary. One noon, when the job was about half done I stopped at the post office to pick up the mail. There was a letter from the government. I opened it, Congratulations from your friends and neighbors, you have been selected to serve your country in the United States Army. I was to report in ten days for my physical and if I passed that I wouldn’t be coming back. I drove up to the potato field and showed the letter to my father. He looked at it but didn’t say much except that a lot of other boys have had to go. It now looked like this was going to delay any farming for a couple of more years. The immediate concern was that I had less than ten days to finish the bridge. The thing that bothered me the most was my father’s failing health and the fact that he had become very discouraged. I had really planned to help him all that I could and hoped that would take some of the pressure off him and help to get him feeling better again.

We worked hard and fast. We finished the bridge the night before I was to report. I had to be at the bus station in St. Johnsbury, which was about twenty miles away by eleven o’clock the next morning. I still had a lot of things to do including putting my machinery away. I had bought some heifers as I was planning to be back in farming right after the bridge job. I still had to sell and get rid of them. It got to be nearly ten thirty. My mother was waiting in the car to take me to the bus as we drove the last heifers up the tailgate of the cattle truck.

We arrived at the bus stop just in time. There were eight or nine other fellows who had also been called to report. They were all country boys and younger than I was. I don’t think that a couple of them had ever been very far from home. The bus took us to the induction center in Manchester New Hampshire, where they put us up in a hotel that night. The next day they tested us for just about everything. Two or three of the fellows were sent back home. They put the rest of us on a train. We rode all night and ended up, the next morning, at Fort Dix New Jersey. The first thing that they did to us was to give us a quick short haircut. The next step I will never forget. We lined up for shots. They had a bunch of medics with large syringes that looked like the kind that the veterinary uses. They would fill them up and each time that they gave a shot would turn a little nut on the plunger stem to allow them to give several shots without refilling. They stood on each side of the line and as we walked by them they jabbed us in the arms from both sides. There didn’t seem to worry much about sterilization and they never bothered to change needles. Some of the fellows’ arms were covered with blood by the time they got through this line. They then handed us each a card with our name on it and it listed the shots that we had received. They said that it was up to us keep our own shot record and be ready to show them whenever asked. If we lost them, we would need to have all the shots again. They said that very seldom did anyone ever lose his shot record.

I spent ten weeks at Fort Dix in basic training and taking tests. At the end of the ten weeks, we all received our orders. There was some problem in Lebanon at that time and many of the men were sent there. I was one of the last ones to receive my orders. I was assigned to go for medic training at Brook Army Hospital at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio Texas. After two or three weeks of this training, several of us received new orders transferring us to the dental course. Upon completion of this course a number of us were assigned to the Dental Detachment at Fort Bliss in Elpaso, Texas. One of the guys had bought an old car. Eight of us piled in with all our duffel bags and belongings and headed for Elpaso. As I think it was around eight hundred miles across Texas, I remember that it was a long, crowded ride with eight of us and all our luggage. We arrived at Fort Bliss the day before Christmas. The base was just about shut down for the Holidays. I was assigned a bed on the second floor of the barracks. This room had about twenty beds. It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve and no one else was around I was sitting on the edge of my bed thinking that this will be the first Christmas away from home and my family. I hadn’t been there long when a sergeant who I had not seen before came in and said, Come on Hill, you are going with me. I followed him not knowing where we were headed. We went into the downstairs barracks and found Mack Carter a Texan who was one of the other fellows that had just rode in from San Antonio with us. He told him to come with us. The sergeant’s name was Beiderstat. He took us to his home to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day with him and his wife and two small children. Things like this really make you appreciate people and make you anxious to help somebody else when you get a chance.

After Christmas, I was assigned to the post dental clinic, which had about thirty-five dentists. I was given the job of working with a fellow named Springer, who was due to get out of the service in a couple of months. He was in charge of the supplies, equipment and maintenance for the clinic. The supply room was about fourteen feet square, with rows of shelves all around the four walls, these stored the supplies. The entrance was a two piece Dutch type door with a shelf on the top of the bottom section. This is where the dentists and dental assistants came to get their supplies. Only Springer and I had keys to this room and no one else was allowed in there. Springer had pretty much been his own boss so he showed me what I needed to know. I ordered most of the supplies from Beaumont Army Hospital, which was just up the road. They would bring them down in an ambulance. For the items that they didn’t carry I had a card that allowed me to pick up them from any supply post on the base.

Only two or three of the dentists were career men. The rest were young dentists just out of dental school who were fulfilling their military obligation. Each dentist was assigned eight patients a day, one each hour. Most of the dentists were real nice fellows who took their work very serious. They all talked about opening their own practice as soon as their time was up. There were a couple of dentists, that I soon learned to watch. They were always losing their instruments and asking for replacements or saying that they had never had whatever they were asking for in the first place. I realized that they were taking them home. To me this was stealing and I felt that it was my job to try to prevent this. Whenever I gave them anything that wasn’t expendable, I made them sign for it. This made them very unhappy and they grumbled to me about it for a while but it solved the problem.

Fort Bliss was a missile base and there was an outpost called Red Canyon about one hundred and eighty five miles north of the main base. This out post was a bunch of Quonset huts out in the desert. We had a small one chair dental clinic up there. Each Sunday afternoon the army would fly a different dentist up there for the week. Most of them didn’t look forward to their turn at Red Canyon. One of the fellows that I took dental training with was in charge of the clinic and stayed up there all the time. One of the dentists who I knew was light fingered and who had complained about having to sign in order to get any more equipment was taking his turn at Red Canyon. Friday afternoon, the day that they came back, I called the kid that was in charge and warned him about this dentist. Around four o’clock he called me back. He was laughing. He said that just before the dentist left, when he wasn’t looking he checked his bags. He found one of them was filled with dental equipment. He had removed the equipment and filled the bag with stones. He laughed and said that the dentist had just got onto the helicopter carrying a bag full of stones.

I didn’t mind the army, as a matter of fact I kind of enjoyed it. The only things that bothered me were that I felt that I could be putting my time to much better use. I was still anxious to farm and I was worried about my dad.

Soon after I arrived at Fort Bliss I received a letter from my mother saying that part of the feed store had burned. It had caught fire from the wood stove in the office. The stove pipe went through a wall into a back room. This is where the fire started. Dad was having a local carpenter, Joe Lavertu, replace the burned section with a new one- story, clear span building using truss rafters.

In my senior year at the University of Vermont, I met a girl whom I hit it off with real well. We spent a lot of time together, and by the end of the school year, we were talking about getting married. She still had a couple more years of college, so we weren’t talking about right off.

Just before leaving for the army I had bought her an engagement ring. Every single day that I had been in the army, I had written to her and she had written to me. I missed her a lot. One Sunday night I got to thinking, what if we were to get married after she got out of school in the spring? That way she could come to Texas and we could rent an off post apartment. She could continue her education at Texas Western College right there in Elpaso. It seemed like a great idea to me so I wrote to her that night and suggested it. I told her that we could experience living in a different part of the country and see and do many things that we might never get another chance to do. Even though we were writing to each other every day, it took about ten days to get a letter up to Vermont and an answer back. It was a long ten days but finally the answer came. She was all excited about the idea but was worried about getting her folks approval. I had to wait a few more days to find out how she handled this. In a few days the answer came, she had convinced her parents, and they had approved. We planned to get married in June. I had to get approved for a leave and find a place to live, which I did.

I flew home and we were married in the Chapel at Norwich University, where her father was a professor. The short time that I was home I found my dad to be very quiet, and he was not himself. This bothered me very much.

Army pay wasn’t very great and I realized that I didn’t have enough money for both of us to fly back to Texas. I did have an old 1946 Buick that I had given up on a few years earlier. I had parked it out behind the barn. It hadn’t run for several years. I got it running and tuned it up the best that I could. The tires were not the greatest, it had one old knobby winter tire on the back. The day after the wedding we packed up and headed for Elpaso. We hadn’t gone far when the car started heating up. I think that it had set so long that the engine block was full of rust. I stopped at a garage and got some old two gallon oil cans and filled them with water. About every twenty miles, we would stop, and I would use a rag to take off the radiator cap and add some cool water. We had about three thousand miles to go and less than five days to get there. The weather was very hot and this didn’t help very much but I kept adding water we kept going. That knobby tire on back rode rough and made a lot of noise, but we kept going. We were on a straight stretch of road in a rural area of Illinois when there was a big bang and the car bounced all over the road then dropped down onto the rim. That knobby tire had blown out. Before I could get out of the car I noticed that a big circle of paint was rolling up and peeling off the hood. I knew that the engine was on fire. I jumped out and opened the hood then ran to the trunk got one of the cans of water and put the fire out. The jolt from the tire had caused the distributor cap to bounce off causing it to backfire through the carburetor. I clipped the cap back down and started the car. Other than peeling the