Emma Bentley Ruzicka and John Bentley

[00:02] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Hi, my name is Emma Bentley Ruzicka My age is 34. Today's date is Monday, May 2, 2022. We're here in the Ozarks, Missouri. My interview partner is doctor John Bentley, my grandfather.

[00:21] JOHN BENTLEY: Hello. My name is John Bentley, and I am Emma's grandfather. My age is 86. It's Monday, May 2, 2022, and we are in the Ozarks, Missouri.

[00:39] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay, Peco, my first question for you. Tell me about your first trip to Missouri, when, why, and how that occurred.

[00:52] JOHN BENTLEY: My first trip to Missouri was on a train. I got on a. On the Pennsylvania railroad train in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That's the capital of Pennsylvania. The train was a direct route all the way to St. Louis. I got on the train with a suitcase and a box, cardboard box tied with string. I was on my way to college. I was going to the University of Missouri, where I had been given a naval scholarship. So I went to the train station with my mom and my dad. They put me on the train 24 hours later. We got to St. Louis. I don't remember much about the train ride, except it was kind of fun sitting there watching the countryside go by. In St. Louis, I had to change trains to a train that got, that was going to go on to Kansas City, but it stopped in the middle of Missouri in a little town called Centralia. We got off the train in Centralia because we were trying to get to the University of Missouri at Columbia. This was 1952. We were doing this. You got on a little shuttle train in centralia and went to, you went south about 15 miles, where you got to Columbia, Missouri. From Centralia. You got off the train and went to the University of Missouri. There was a little shuttle bus, as I recall, that got us to the. To the. To the admissions office on that train from centralia to Columbia, I met my roommate, actually, I met a guy that I had never met before who was coming from the other direction. He came from New Mexico, and he also had been awarded a naval scholarship to University of Missouri. He and I then took the little shuttle train to Columbia, went to the university admissions office, and there we met a little old lady who was the house mother. And she said to us, would you two guys like to live together? And we didn't know each other, but we both said, sure, that's fine. He then became my very best friend, both in college and for the rest of my life. His name was Jerry Geist, and he was from New Mexico, and we lived together. And we were both in the Navy program, and we both took about the same course as our first year. That was a long train ride, though, from Pennsylvania to Columbia to the dorm room where we settled down. And that was our college. That was the beginning of our college career.

[04:40] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Follow up questions Jerry Geist, how did he also have a box tied with string? Wasn't that part of how you guys found yourselves kindred spirits? Because he also arrived with a box.

[04:55] JOHN BENTLEY: Yeah, he had a suitcase and a box just like I did. It was interesting. His father also worked for the telephone company of New Mexico, and my dad worked for the telephone company of Pennsylvania. So we had a lot of similarities. We both were there on navy scholarships, and we continued to have similar experiences for the rest of our lives. That first day was interesting in that I can still remember the house mother, who was the little old lady that checked us in, saying, you two guys look like you ought to live together, which we did.

[05:40] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: The other detail I love about that story is, say, how prior to that trip, how far west had you been in your life before coming to Missouri?

[05:51] JOHN BENTLEY: Oh, I had. The furthest west I'd been was probably a little town in Pennsylvania. Where my father was from was a town called Corey, Pennsylvania, which was up in the northwest part of Pennsylvania. His family all lived in Corey, and we had driven to quarry on vacation a couple of times, but I had never been out of Pennsylvania before. Westward. I had been out of Pennsylvania a couple of summers because I worked in Vermont, on Lake Champlain at a camp. It was really a neat thing. And I flew there from Harrisburg. I could fly to Burlington, Vermonthe and the camp was in an island in the middle of Burlington. And I did that for two summers. But that was my other adventure.

[06:54] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: I didn't know you flew there.

[06:56] JOHN BENTLEY: Yes.

[06:57] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Wow. Okay, so you're here, you're in Columbia, you're on the Mu campus. When did you next go back to Philadelphia after your arrival?

[07:11] JOHN BENTLEY: I think I went home at Christmas time.

[07:13] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay.

[07:13] JOHN BENTLEY: I got home at Christmas on the train, spent Christmas and a week with my family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where my dad worked. And then I went back again. So I took that train probably three or four times over the years.

[07:42] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay, tell me about this would have been, what, a couple years into your time at Mu when you met granny, right? Or was it a year in, when did you meet her?

[07:53] JOHN BENTLEY: I met my future wife Roseanne. Not until my last year, that would be 1956. And a good friend introduced us both. I had another girlfriend at the time, and she and I had had a big fight, so I didn't have a girlfriend. So I met Roseanne, and it was just like they say, it was love at first sight. I took one look at her and thought, oh, my goodness, she's great. So that spring, the spring of my senior year, it was the spring of her sophomore year, I came to Springfield and met her family at the time, and everything clicked.

[08:54] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Tell me about what that was like, meeting the Kanauer family.

[08:59] JOHN BENTLEY: It was really kind of weird because I came to Springfield one weekend to meet Roseanne. She did not tell me that it was the weekend of her grandfather's death. So grandpa Tim Donahue, a good irishman, had died. And I came. I knew where the house was. I found the house, went to the house, knocked on the door, and they were having a big party in there. They were having a good old fashioned irish wake. And they saw me and they said they welcomed me. And it was really fun. The house was full of people, in a sense, celebrating Grandpa Donahue's life and death. And somewhere in that group of people, Roseanne was there. Anyway, that's how I met all the Kanauers. That's their last name, Kanaur, good old german name. But Roseanne's mother's maiden name was Donahue, and that was the irish part of that family.

[10:21] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: And was it then that summer, Peka, that you worked for link Sr. Or was that later?

[10:28] JOHN BENTLEY: That was later that summer. I had graduated from MU, so I was a college graduate. And when I graduated, because I was there on a Navy scholarship, I was commissioned in the navy. So I became a navy officer and had to go to Pensacola, Florida, because I was going to take flight training. So Roseanne stayed in Missouri, finish, and she had another two years of college, which she managed to complete in a year and a half. I'm not quite sure how she got that done, but she did. And she came down to Pensacola twice to see me while I was down there in flight training. And she also came east of Pennsylvania so she could meet my family, because she'd never met my family until that summer, the summer of 1956. That would have been okay.

[11:46] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: How did that go? How was granny's first meeting with your family?

[11:52] JOHN BENTLEY: I think they loved her just like I did. She was a little bit surprised that they were. My parents were very strict. You had to sit up straight at the table. You had to use the silverware right. You had to eat right. You couldn't run and hoop and holler. You had to behave yourself. But my parents loved her. And when I was in Florida then, one of the funny things that happened was that when you got the flight training in Pensacola, which I was down there that summer learning how to fly airplanes as a naval officer. You got paid, and you got paid extra. You got flight pay, which, as I recall, was $100 a month. Anyway, I had extra money to buy a fancy car, so I bought a little mg sports car and drove it around Pensacola with all the other naval officers and pilots, but I drove them. When I finished flight training in Pensacola, I still had another six months of flight training to go, which I had to do in Kansas. But anyway, I drove the car up to Pennsylvania. Granny, I call her Granny Roseanne, my fiance. I don't know that we were engaged yet or not, but anyway, she met me in Pennsylvania. She came again and stayed with my folks. And then we decided we would drive because I had to go to Kansas for the rest of my flight training, which was right out there beside Missouri. So we loaded up the MG, which is not a very big car.

[14:11] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah.

[14:12] JOHN BENTLEY: With her suitcases, my suitcase, a couple of little items, and we got in the car, and off we went. We were going to drive all the way to Missouri in that little car, which we did.

[14:24] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Wow.

[14:26] JOHN BENTLEY: I think my mother was totally shocked because she knew we would have to spend a night somewhere.

[14:33] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Oh, yeah.

[14:35] JOHN BENTLEY: Which we did.

[14:36] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah.

[14:37] JOHN BENTLEY: And we behaved. I had to promise my mother we would behave. Anyway, we got to Missouri, and we stayed a couple of days in Springfield, Missouri. And then I went on and went to a little town in western Kansas called Hutchison, Kansas. Hutchinson, Kansas was where the navy had multi engine flight, their flight training school. So when I had finished in Pensacola, I had learned how to fly single engine planes. But I decided that I didn't want to land on aircraft carriers because that was obviously way too dangerous for me. So I went to the multi engine flight training school in Hutchinson, Kansas, which was a six month school. And. Oh, that's good. And I could drive back and forth. It would take me about 6 hours in the MG to go from Springfield to Hutchinson, Kansas and back. So I was in Hutchison, Kansas, and could drive back and forth. Maybe I did that once or twice a month.

[16:01] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay.

[16:02] JOHN BENTLEY: For the six months I was there.

[16:04] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: But for part of that, Granny was in Columbia, right?

[16:08] JOHN BENTLEY: She was in, she was in Springfield for the summer.

[16:11] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah.

[16:11] JOHN BENTLEY: And then she was in finishing her junior year and early senior year in college, where she was training to be a teacher. And then when we were in Hutchison, Kansas, several of my friends and I would drive from Hutchinson, Kansas. Instead of going to Springfield, we'd go to Columbia, where we would meet some of the people, including Roseanne and some of her sorority sisters, because these other guys that were going through flight training with me needed a date now and then. So Roseanne would get him a date, and we would have nice weekends in Columbia, and then we would head back to Hutchison, and she would settle down and do her schooling, which she did, because she accelerated it a little bit. And so she got permission to graduate early because she took some extra courses quickly. So she graduated in the early spring of her senior year, rather than waiting until the summer of her senior year.

[17:41] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay. Yeah. You once told me a funny story about driving from Kansas to Columbia with someone who you were in flight training with and you guys were drinking some. Was it, like, pina coladas or something? Tell me that.

[17:58] JOHN BENTLEY: Well, yes, we would. At the end of the week. At the end of a week of flight training, we would. We bought a. We would buy a bottle or two of alcohol. I can't remember exactly what kind it was. It was probably vodka. And we then started driving east from Hutchinson, Kansas, to Columbia, Missouri. And one time we overdid it. And we. By the time we got to Columbia, there were four of us in the car, and two of us were violently sick. Fortunately, we recovered quickly, and we could still have our dates, because Roseanne had arranged for dates for these guys. One of the guys really named Charles Runnett, who was from Pittsburgh, but he was in flight training with me. He met a girl at Columbia that he really just fell in love with. It never worked out. I mean, he didn't, but he kept wanting to go back. He and I would go back a couple times, and he would see. Her name was Nancy Anderson. She was lovely. And anyway, I'm not sure what happened to Nancy, but she did not marry Pete. Pete ended up marrying somebody on the east coast, but Pete ended up flying airplanes out in the Pacific Ocean, just like I did.

[19:41] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Tell me about learning how to fly an airplane. What was that like?

[19:48] JOHN BENTLEY: Well, learning to fly an airplane was difficult for me. I got terribly motion sick. So when I first started learning how to fly, when I was in Pensacola and I was in small airplanes, the single engine plane with an instructor in the backseat. Anytime we would bounce around or move, I got very nauseated. It got so bad that at one point they said, well, you can't fly. And I said, yeah, I can. We can do it. So then I had to go see a psychiatrist.

[20:28] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Wow.

[20:28] JOHN BENTLEY: The Navy psychiatrist who decided that it was just total fear that was making.

[20:37] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Me ill. Why didn't they believe it was just motion sickness?

[20:42] JOHN BENTLEY: Well, something was making me motion sick.

[20:45] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah. Okay.

[20:46] JOHN BENTLEY: I think they thought it was fear, but they didn't want to give me any medicine because you couldn't take medicine if you're going to fly. So I learned how to fly and keep the nausea down by chewing dentine. Chewing gum. I could, I'd take a pack of dentine up with me, and by the end of an hour and a half training flight, I would have chewed the whole pack. But it worked. I could finally learn how to fly. I wasn't a very good pilot, but I learned how to fly.

[21:24] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Was it, did the motion sickness get better on the bigger planes?

[21:28] JOHN BENTLEY: Oh, yeah.

[21:28] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah.

[21:29] JOHN BENTLEY: That's probably one of the reasons I took the bigger planes. Although one of the events that occurred while we were in Pensacola was that we were temporarily stationed on board a aircraft carrier which was stationed in Pensacola harbor. And the people who stayed in Pensacola who learned how to fly single engine planes had to carrier qualify by landing on a carrier. And one day we actually were on the carrier watching these guys practice their carrier landings, and two of the planes struck each other.

[22:19] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Oh, man.

[22:20] JOHN BENTLEY: And I thought, that does it. I'm not going to do this anymore.

[22:24] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah.

[22:25] JOHN BENTLEY: So that, that's what convinced me to become a multiengine pilot, not a single engine pilot. One of the, one of the more famous guys that was in our class, though, was a guy named Gene Cernan. He turned out to become an astronaut. He was a really nice guy, and as you might guess, was one of the world's all time great pilots.

[22:57] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah. Okay. So you, was it after flight training, did you, you ended flight training right around the time that granny graduated? Is that how that worked?

[23:12] JOHN BENTLEY: Yes.

[23:12] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay. And then you guys got married just shortly after that, that spring. Then after granny graduated, I finished flight.

[23:20] JOHN BENTLEY: Training in Hutchinson in probably in April or May and no earlier than that. I was there all winter. So I finished flight training, I think, in February or March. She graduated in early April, and we got married in mid April of that, of 1956. Right. And then the navy, I got my orders in. I finished flight training. So I was assigned to a multiengine squadron of airplanes on Okinawa, and that's where she and I went after we got married. We got in a car and drove to the west coast, and I got on a plane and flew to Okinawa. And she got on a plane and flew home. She was going to wait until she got a navy flight because it was very expensive to fly from the west coast to Okinawa in those days. And not only that, but you were flying in multi engine airplanes not in jets. So it took 30 hours of flying to get all the way from the west coast to Japan and then back to Okinawa, which was another couple hours this side of Japan. But then we discovered that. Or she discovered, or I don't guess I discovered it because I wasn't there. I was on Okinawa, she was in Springfield, and we were trying to talk back and forth. In those days, you couldn't talk very well on the phone. It wasn't like talking on a cell phone now. And at one point she said to me, I think I'm pregnant. I said, holy cats, we gotta get you over here.

[25:35] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah.

[25:36] JOHN BENTLEY: So we did. We bought a commercial ticket.

[25:40] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay.

[25:41] JOHN BENTLEY: And she flew over there. So that's how we all got together.

[25:47] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: And then shortly after that, or I guess several months after that, then Jeff arrived, right?

[25:55] JOHN BENTLEY: Yes. She got there. Well, she got there in, let's see, April, May, June. She got there in late June, early July. Jeff was born in January, so she.

[26:07] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Had some time to get acclimated.

[26:10] JOHN BENTLEY: I guess she had three to four to five months of getting used to Okinawa. I think she was morning sick most of the time. Yeah, it was pretty tough. And we had a house way out in the middle of nowhere. Okinawa is a pretty little island, but it was still kind of beat up from the war. But we lived up on a mountain, up on a hillside in a beautiful little house. But by the time Jeff came, we had been assigned to government housing, and we had moved back into the base, which is nice.

[26:52] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Okay, so what was it like? You were both in your early twenties then, right? You have a new baby in a foreign land. What was it like?

[27:08] JOHN BENTLEY: Well, it was hard because we obviously had no idea how to take care of the baby. However, we somehow met and hired this wonderful okinawan lady named Yoshiko, who moved in with us. And she really took care of Jeff for Jeff's first year of his life. She was always there. We were just stumbling around. You know, he would cry and we would scream at each other. It was tough.

[27:48] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: And she would step in and help.

[27:50] JOHN BENTLEY: Oh, yeah, she would scoop him up, take care of him. Anyway, with Yoshiko's help, we got Jeffrey through the first year of his life.

[28:05] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: And she couldn't. Could she speak any English or.

[28:09] JOHN BENTLEY: She could speak some English. She was very good, though. She would cook and take care of the baby and take care of us. Annie was teaching then. I mean, she went. She got a job teaching school, and she taught military run school for the workers that worked on the base. And most of them were Okinawan who, and they couldn't speak English, so the kids couldn't speak English. And Roseanne was trying to teach them. She had one little boy in the class who knew English. She was, and that was her teaching experience. She did an incredible job of teaching these kids. She taught them how to read and write and do a little bit of arithmetic.

[29:14] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: So while you were there in Okinawa, were you applying to med schools or how'd that work?

[29:21] JOHN BENTLEY: Yeah, I wanted to go. I mean, I always wanted to go to med school. So when I was in college, I took all pre med courses. And when I graduated from college, then I started applying to go to med school, and I wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I was from, even though I had gone to Missouri undergraduate school, going to University of Pennsylvania seemed like a far fetched thing because University of Pennsylvania turned out to be the very first medical school in the country. But somehow I don't know why or how. Although I think my father, who had gone to University of Pennsylvania undergraduate school, played a role in talking to people there at Penn and getting me in. But that's how I went to medical school at Penn when I got out of the Navy. So four years had gone by. And when you went to medical school in those days, just like now, if you have your basic pre med sciences down, you're going to do okay. If four years have gone by and you've been flying airplanes around and taking.

[30:54] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Care of a baby Pacific Ocean and.

[30:57] JOHN BENTLEY: Looking for submarines and doing other goofy stuff, you're not very well equipped to get to medical school. But somehow we managed it.

[31:07] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: And you guys moved from Okinawa to Pennsylvania, back to Pennsylvania, and then. Was my dad born there?

[31:16] JOHN BENTLEY: Yes. The next baby that would be your dad came during our first year of medical school. That would be 1961, when he was born. So there we were in medical school, not knowing much about premed stuff with two kids.

[31:43] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah. Doesn't actually sound all that much easier than having the first baby, really, in Okinawa.

[31:50] JOHN BENTLEY: Oh, yeah. Well, Roseanne's sister came to Philadelphia and helped us with that one. She took the role that yoshiko played in Okinawa.

[32:04] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: So tell me about med school.

[32:08] JOHN BENTLEY: Well, University of Pennsylvania med school was very, very difficult for me, but I loved it. And there were some really nice professors there who kind of took me under their wing and helped me. They could see I was struggling. There were three veterans in our class. All three of us had been in the Navy for three or four years. One of those guys failed. He dropped out. But anyway, med school was an interesting experience in that. We moved into center Philadelphia. We met a lot of nice people. And I was a average or below average student most of the time in medical school, but for some reason the professors thought that was okay.

[33:08] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah. Yeah. Somebody has to be average, I guess. It's good.

[33:13] JOHN BENTLEY: Yeah, I was average. One of the best parts was we in the summertime, then we would go. We either came back to Missouri and worked, or one summer we went to the New Jersey seashore and spent the summer at the shore, which was really nice. And they got me a job in a orthopedic hospital in Atlantic City, which turned out to be Donald. That was before Donald Trump built his big casino.

[33:55] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: It was a different atlantic city.

[33:57] JOHN BENTLEY: Yeah. It was a beautiful little town. So we liked Philadelphia. And we lived in a nice house, a rowhouse, which is unique to Philadelphia. And Annie got a job teaching there, just like she did on Okinawa. And she really started what was called the head Start program, which was a nice school for underprivileged kids. And so she ran that in part of Philadelphia.

[34:37] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Wow. So then from there, you guys ended up in Madison. You did your residency, right?

[34:46] JOHN BENTLEY: When you graduate from medical school, then you have to have. And you pick a specialty. So I picked what is called internal medicine. Went to Madison, Wisconsin, another great city. Madison is such a nice town. We loved Madison. And the two boys grew in Madison. And then our last year in Madison, actually, our last couple of months in Madison, our daughter was born. We had a great time in Madison. And then we came to Springfield.

[35:29] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah. Where you finished it out with one more child.

[35:36] JOHN BENTLEY: Right? So Jonathan, the last one was born in Springfield. So we had an okinawan baby. We had a Philadelphia baby. We had a Madison baby. And we had a Springfield baby. Probably good. We didn't move anymore. We had more kids.

[35:58] EMMA BENTLEY RUZICKA: Yeah. Well, I know we're getting to the end of our time. I wanted to make sure we circled around and got you back to Springfield. We'll have to save what happened in Springfield for the next interview, I guess, but I think we're it.