This is an interview with Ms.Barbara Farrar (BF) conducted in Tampa, Florida on the date, November 22, 1999 at Seminole Heights Public Library and the interviewer is Rebecca Wells (RW), representing the "Juniors to Seniors: Hillsborough Remembers Oral History Collection Project."

Rebecca Wells: Um, growing up with your parents and grandparents, did you ever hear of the World War I experiences that they had and just, like, how did you feel about that?

Barbara Farrar: Yes, uh, I certainly did. My grandfather lived with us and he spoke frequently of World War I, uh, in which he participated and, uh, my great grandfather who I did get to meet when he was near death, uh, had been in the Civil War and he had written quite a, a lot about that in a journal and that was passed on to me. But, yes, World War I was definitely discussed in my house and the impact that it had on this nation.

RW: So, did you ever think that you would be living through something that they went through, in your life?

BF: Not at all. I think they felt that that was the war to end all wars, you know, it was just not going to happen any more. And, of course it, it just broke my parents heart to think about this because, they were very glad that they didn't have a son who they might lose in this war, uh, and I think that's why when I wanted to join the WAVES and go off, they had a fit and I was not allowed to go because they had to sign for me to go (laughs).

RW: Um, before the War started, when you were in elementary school and going through before high school, did they have and, like, drills and get under your desk kind of quot;there is going to be a bomb comingquot; any special kind of thing?

BF: Nothing like that.No, uh-un.Not until Senior high school and we had the air raid attacks, uh, and, yes, we did have drills for that but not before, not in earlier school.years.

RW: And like what kind of drills, what would you do during the drills?

BF: Well it was pretty much what the civilian population did which was to take cover.Yes, under the desk, in the cloak room, anywhere you could be to get away from the roof falling in on ya. Of course, looking back, I don't think it would have helped very much.If we got hit with a bomb it wouldn't have worked.

RW: Did they have any kind of bomb shelters, anything like that at Hillsborough?

BF: Uh, no. I never was aware of any public bomb shelters in Tampa. Now I had some friends whose parents built bomb shelters in their backyards, uh, that, just for their families. But, no, I, I never heard of any bomb shelters.

RW: Did you have a bomb shelter?

BF: No.

RW: At your house?

BF: No, did not.

RW: Um, at Hillsborough were their any, like, specific clubs that were, like, created for the war effort, that had anything do with the war while you were there?

BF: Uh, no, the only thing that we had that was war preparing was the ROTC and, uh, they drilled constantly and they were very much a part of our school experience and, uh, a lot of those fellows went into the military before graduation.They never graduated, and, uh, but they went in because of ROTC and their accomplishments there. They went in as officers not just as enlisted men, because they had this training, and it was extensive training, it was not just a lot of marching with rifles, they had survival training.

But, uh, we didn't have, uh, we had, uh, a club my senior year, yeah my senior year, where we, we wrote letters to servicemen. Now most of us individually did that, we had pen pals overseas, both in the service and both in the countries they were serving. Uh, but several classes that I was in we wrote, we had names of service men, and we wrote as a class. We just uh, on a large sheet of paper and decorated it and we sent it to these service men. Uh, but, uh, other than that, I don't know of any clubs specifically that had to do with the war.

RW: Do you remember, um, how like the high school sports were affected because of the war, seeing as how the men . . .

BF: Decimated.

RW: There's no sports.

BF: There just, we had a good football team, and it was a winning football team, the Hillsborough Big Red. But, I remember, uh, them saying that the track and basketball and those sports, were just there was nobody to play but girls. They, you know, we had a great girls basketball team. But, uh, but we were fortunate in that we had football players. Now, some of them left to go and then we had other, other fellows that came in. But we maintained enough to play football and, and heroically so, because we were known then as the Big Red and we rolled over our opponents, so . . .

RW: And was there any, like, where you wouldn't be able to have a game because something was going on or . . .

BF: Blackouts.

RW: Yeah.

BF: A practice. Not necessarily games, but the practice was definitely limited because they had to be out on the field with the lights on. And we had an awful lot of blackouts, they were frequent and they didn't know when they were coming. So it was nothing they alerted the schools to get ready, "Don't come this evening because we're going to have a blackout," because we wouldn't have had notification had it been real. Uh, I never knew of a game that was postponed because of a blackout.

RW: Just, like, were you parents more protective, during the war, of you rather when there wasn't a war, like, did they keep track of everywhere you were going and kind of limit you?

BF: No. Not at all. The only that my parents, particularly my father, uh.You understand we were a big military town and we also were a seaport where naval ships came in. So, there was never a time where we didn't have, uh, air force, army, and navy just in great supply and therefore there were a lot of USO entertainments and Maritime club entertainments and the girls from Hillsborough, uh, we wanted to go to those and we went to them. They were chaperoned.

But there were also, while you were there you met some of the fellows and they would want you to go out with them. And, and, my father was extremely strict about that, because these fellows were here preparatory shipping out. When they came here they were to be trained, they were to be trained. And the next step was gone. Oh, we were just all supportive, " You know Dad, they're not going to hear long and we just want to go out and show them a good time" and he says "Never mind about that! They won't be around. You need to concentrate on people your own age." And I say, "But they are my own age!" (laughs) But, it, unless it was a chaperoned affair or sponsored by the USO or, uh, by the Helenic Center or whatever.

In my family, I couldn't date service men. I could bring them home, we had, uh, I can't remember many Sunday dinners that we didn't have a service man or men in our home for dinner. It was just something that was done throughout this city. Uh, there was a movie that played during World War II called Sunday Dinner For A Soldier. And, uh, it came out, I think, in response to this big movement all over the country that people were doing, and it was interesting. You got to meet a lot of the fellows some of them were married, some of them, you know, were separated from their families and you just felt like you were really doing something good. It helped you, they contributed to you, and a lot of them would write after they were overseas, they would write.

They had little V-mail letters, you know, from the fellows, "I remember that wonderful time we had at your home." We had a lake house and in the summertime we would take them out to swim and to ski in the lake and, so, they enjoyed that or to the beach to picnic. It wasn't just sitting in the house, you know, we tried to show them a good time.

RW: And, like, when you were with these men, was the topic of conversation always the war, the war, the war or was it a regular conversation, like friends?

BF: Not really. Just regular conversation. Uh, of course, when they were trying to coerce you to intimacy it was, "Well I might not be alive this time next month," ya know. They were trying to get you to, to, let down your guard and which is what my father was aware of see, he remembers this from World War I, you understand. But that's the only time that they ever talked about it. I think it was just something that they wanted to try to forget about it when they were in situations where we were having fun. I think imminent death was on all their minds and it had to be; it was on our minds for them. That was the sad side of this, the real tragic side, because you knew a lot of them were never coming back.

RW: So, when you had graduation when you were a senior, was that hard knowing that all your boys that you grew up with in high school and everything were over somewhere else and you didn't know if they were alive or dead?

BF: Exactly, exactly. It was extremely hard. It was a very emotional time and there was such, an, a feeling of patriotism that I have not experienced in any of the successive, uh, wars. Everybody pulled together; it was a joint, uh, community war effort. It seems to me in retrospect that at least 80% of what we did in our activities were geared toward or as a result of the war. I mean we were either restricted, uh, because of shortages due to war and I never heard anybody complain about anything that was in scarcity because if it.

They were glad to relinquish it, they wanted to, and if you saw anybody that wasn't really onboard with that, well you just gave them a little tongue-lashing, "Well it's just to darn bad you're not bleeding in a trench over there some where, you know." Uh, you can give up these things, you see. Travel was just nil.I mean gasoline was at a premium. It was all rationed and meat was rationed. We grew our vegetables in victory gardens. Everything went to the war effort, and I think because we had so much military here and the shipyard and all the munitions factories and things, we knew that what we were giving up was being produced for the war effort.And girls went to work in the shipyard because they was such a scarcity of men.

RW: They weren't very scared of going to work and getting dirty?

BF: Oh not at all. No, no. You know about "Rosie the Riveter" well this, I mean I had friends who continued a trade in welding or in munitions or whatever that they did at the shipyard, um, long after the war was over. It was a training ground, but it also was, they went because they wanted to help.And a lot of my friends went into nursing because they, they learned a lot about army nurses and navy nurses and they went overseas after they got their training.

RW: So you think a lot people, what they did further in their life was based on what happened in World War?

BF: Exactly, exactly. It definitely impacted us that way.Yes.

RW: So there is a lot of selflessness involved.

BF: I'm glad to hear you use that term and that is so, that's so indicative of the attitude, selflessness. Uh, there just wasn't a selfish feeling about it. We didn't have any flag burnings. We didn't have any, uh, draft cards burned up and all that kind of stuff because everybody believed in the effort that they were doing and nobody . . . we weren't going to get over and get killed, they weren't just anxious to go I'm sure deep down but, they went and they went because it was the thing to do for your country, and every . . . The schools we had, I don't if Hillsborough still has, the flag raising in the morning and the flag raising in the evening, lowering rather, do they have that and play the bugle?

RW: I don't know.

BF: They don't do that?

RW: They do raise it.

BF: They do raise but they don't bring it down in the afternoon.

RW: I see people bring it up in morning so I assume it comes down just not with the bugle.

BF: But not bugle. Well we all stood up, every single morning we stood up and, and the flag went up and they played for it to come down. It was a very patriotic time and, and, all of our songs, a lot of our songs on the hit parade had to do with, uh, the war and you know the whole theme was about the war.It was just so permeated. It was part of your life and it made you, you grew up faster.

Your innocence, you weren't innocent anymore and I guess in a way that was pretty sad. I mean, we weren't the silly teenagers that we probably should have been it would have been in some ways a lot easier and a lot more fun. But we were very serious because this was getting at our inner of inners, this was our life and, uh, it was a life that we wanted to protect, a way of life we wanted to protect.

RW: Do you think most people were more optimistic about the war or a little kind of "Oh gosh, I don't think we gonna win," was everybody pretty much sure?

BF: The whole, the whole attitude was "We will this war." You know . . .

RW: No doubt about it.

BF: No doubt about that. We knew that if the country didn't, as a, as a total group of citizens, support the men that was over there fighting, we would end up like the London Blitz. I mean, we were, and particularly here in Tampa, we were such a target because of the shipyard, because of the two huge bases we had here. Had, if they had missiles, like they had now, we would have been hit, long range missiles, we would defiantly have been hit. But they didn't, thank goodness, and, but we were afraid of being bombed by planes and that's why we had the Civil Air Patrol and, and, the airplane watches that we did.

And I can tell that I spent many, many a hours spotting planes and some planes, enemy planes, did get through and they were reported and brought down. But, uh, not shot down, but they were brought down or escorted down. But, no it was, there was never any thinking that we would lose this war. There was an underlying fear that it might, that some of it might have to be fought on our soil and that was the whole push of the service man's thinking and the, the military thinking was, this can't happen, we're not have our families at stake here.

RW: Uh, was it where like everyone has a job to do kind of, this is your job, this is what you do, you're going to spot planes, you're going to do this and you're going to work together like a community, like everyone had a responsibility?

BF: Exactly. Yeah, and we had War bond drives, you know, and we collected, oh, the big thing was you collected what was known then as tin foil, you call it aluminum foil now. It was tin foil, it was heavy, lead, it was kind of a lead foil that went to war, I mean it went to make munitions. We didn't have anything like that for, for civilian use anymore. But we would, anywhere we saw any that was scrap anywhere we'd go collecting it, and I had huge balls of it, big as basketballs, of tin foil. And they places where you would turn it in, and, and it would shipped to wherever they were going to use it.

RW: So a little kid could . . . be a part of the war.

BF: Participate . . . Be a part of the war. Sure.

RW: Had some responsibility.

RW: How would you describe . . . was everyone willing to ration things, really willing at the beginnin,g when you first knew you had to do it, were you kind of, kind of unsure about it, even just a little bit.

BF: Uh, Rebecca, I honestly can tell you that that was not a feeling, it was not a feeling in my family or any of my neighbors. Now, I can't tell you that it didn't exist in some parts of this city, I don't that because I didn't live there. I know in my neighborhood and among my friends and my parents' friends, it was what they felt they were doing for, for the good of the war. You couldn't get tires, there was just, you know, if your tires wore out, well that's, that's just too bad.

It was, there were so many products that were no longer available. But nobody complained and, and, you had rationing (hello, somebody passes by). You had tickets, you had rationing tickets and you would save them up if you were going to have a special kind of meal for somebody's birthday or something. You would save that, you wouldn't be able to have those kinds of foods for quite a while and, then, all of a sudden you could cash them in and get what you wanted. But it wasn't a hardship, it wasn't looked upon as a hardship.

RW: Did students and people in general feel that the war was going to end quickly or just however long it takes, as long as we win, that kind of . . .

BF: As long as it takes. I don't think anybody thought it was going to be a pushover because we had seen what happened in Europe We had seen what the Nazi's had done up there and taken over entire countries. No, we knew this was going to be a hard-fought war.

RW: So you didn't mind rationing year, after year, after year.

BF: No. Did not, and you see, elastic you couldn't get. Your brassieres and your underpants had no elastic in them. It was just a cloth band with a button.And there were all sorts of, uh, style changes that were altered to meet the, the demand for some of the materials that went to war. You couldn't get silk, that was going for parachutes. Nobody had silk stockings or silk blouses or anymore. There were colors, green, none of the green dyes. You couldn't get, clothes weren't green, except military clothes, they were all green. But, that was hard to find anything that was green. I know I was a scout leader and the girl scout uniforms ended up being a brown, tan thing. They weren't green anymore.

RW: Oh, so that's why they are brown now. Wow.

BF: We didn't have brownies back then. But, the uniforms you, you just couldn't do it, there was no dye for green. I don't know if you ever the comment, there was a cigarette called Lucky Strike and their motto during the World War II was, quot;Lucky Strike green has gone to war,quot; because the package was green and all of a sudden it wasn't anymore, unrecognizable.

RW: Uh, did you feel a different kind of atmosphere in the town before the war and during the war and after the war?

BF: After the war, it was a celebration, it was, there was no longer the serious aspect of life. I mean, everybody was so relived that those who could come home, came home. We had gone through the grieving of losing those we lost and missing them still, but it wasn't that heavy, intense grieving that you had. Uh, the GI's came back and many of them went on to complete their education, in both high school and college, with government money. Uh, there was a boom in building. It was a time of prosperity.Because the Depression preceded World War II.

During the war there was plenty of money to be had, there were good jobs in defense but, it wasn't a boom time at all. But, after the war, because there had not been the materials to build houses. You will notice in Tampa, those homes that were built during World War II were not lumber, they were not, they were concrete, concrete blocks, and we've never had cinder blocks in Florida because they absorb so much dampness. It's not a preferable kind of building material. But, shoot, you couldn't get lumber.Lumber had gone to war, and so the whole attitude, Rebecca, was one of relief, jubilance that it was over.And now let's get back to living like normal human beings again, let's get back to, to having a good life.

RW: And you went back the normal life?

BF: Yeah.

RW: An easy transition for everybody?

BF: What did you say? I'm sorry.

RW: Was it an easy transition for everybody or?

BF: As far as I could tell, yes. Yes, it was nice, it was pleasant, you know. Things that we had missed returned, not just people but things returned.

RW: Just going back to school, just, like, the different nationalities in school. Were there any Jewish people in the school that you knew of and how they may have felt with the war considering what was happening to them over seas?

BF: Yes. Definitely, and there were many people here of Italian descant and who had relatives in Italy. We also had a very good friend who was German and her grandparents were still in Germany and were, according to her, in, in the Nazi movement.And she was upset about that and talked to me a lot about it because she didn't believe in Nazism. But I think she said it was her grandfather who was very much pro-Nazi. We had, we had neighbors on my street who were German, and who flew the swastika and they were asked to take it down.And so, they put it in their living room and at night they would have the lights beamed on the wall and this big Nazi flag on the wall, but they couldn't fly it outside.

BF: (continues) As far as, I think, the war with Japan probably created the strongest feeling of anger among the people, because it was a sneak attack. Uh, the Japanese were over here talking peace, nationally, and at the same time, Pearl Harbor was bombed. To this day, uh, I have people, friends, who hate the Japanese, and the Japanese people had nothing to do with the war, but anymore than we had anything to due with some of the atrocities that happened in the jungles, in the South Pacific, but they happened. Uh, it created, yes it created, anti-German, anti-Japanese feelings, it really did among a lot of people and it still exists, unfortunately, in some of my generation.In particularly among the service men who went over there and, and were imprisoned or who were damaged for life in the fight.They came back with broken bodies and they're still the quot;damn Japsquot;.

You know, it's sad because, and I don't know maybe I would feel the same way had I actually been over there fighting, I don't know. But I, all I can think of is that so many of those nationalities today, so many of the citizens of those countries, had absolutely nothing to do with World War II, you know. What could be more horrible than, than the atom bomb dropped over there in Japan. I mean no matter what they did to us at Pearl Harbor nothing could be more devastating and war is a horror and I think what came out of World War II.

* Side two of the Tape*

BF: What came out of World War II was a resolve that this will not happen again, we can't let this happen again. But, it did, and that's, you know, I had very, very close friends were at the battles of Sipan, Hiroshima, and as bloody as the European theater was, nothing was like fighting the Japanese. We didn't have a clue what it would be like because life was not meaningful to them as it was to us. You know, it was an honor for them to die.And that's why we had the Kamikaze planes just dive bombing into the ships and, oh, it was a wonderful heroic thing for them. So it was a different feeling, a different mind set, about war and what was honorable to them was just plain stupid to us. You know, why would you commit suicide to do this.

But, their punishing methods, they were torture masters. If you were imprisoned in the Japanese War Camp you lived a living hell, uh, and not that the German capture was wonderful either but this was a different kind of thing. It was devious, just the things that they could think up to do to people.

But, uh, at any rate, it was a terrible war.It was a long war.It was a painful war, but it evidently did not teach the lessons that we who were involved in it thought that it would. It didn't teach people to, to stay out of war, to solve things in a more peaceful way. So, we failed in that, and I think my whole generation has felt that way, that while we fought and we saved this country from devastation we certainly didn't save future generations from going to another war. I think that was the feeling of defeat that we had about that. We sacrificed because we wanted to, we sacrificed for our own self-preservation but, we hoped it would be for the preservation of future generations, but it didn't work out that way.

RW: Thank you very much.