Kendal Shaber and Mac Sheesley

[00:01] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: What does that mean? Boy Scout? That's Cub Scout. Salute. I'm ready. Are you ready? My name is Lawrence Sheesley I'm 97 and about four fifths years of age. Today is. You already have. August 20, 2022. We're in Boise, Idaho. My conversation partner is Kendall Schaber My relationship. She's my wartime friend. And at times, my personal savior's daughter. That's it.

[01:02] KENDALL SCHABER: My name is Kendall Schaber. My age is 60. Today's date is August 20, 2022. And we're here in Boise. And Mack Sheesley is my conversation partner. And he was a dear friend of my father's. And somebody who changed our family's trajectory in life. So, you know, Mack, over the last year, you and I have gone over dad's war diaries. Because you both served in the South Pacific. And that's been great. But I want to go back a little farther, to the 1930s in Boise. Since we're in Boise now and you've spent a majority of your life here, and dad was here in the thirties as well. This is also a. It's an area. The thirties are my area of study in history. And you live the thirties. So if we could talk just a little bit about what Boise was like in the late thirties and early forties. What are some of your really vivid memories of Boise?

[02:17] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: An early memory. On the corner of 8th and Idaho street, where the city hall and city jail were located, there was a fountain with multiple drinking places in it. It was a big circular dish. And I remember having to stand up on a stone block to reach the fountain and get a drink. And as I was drinking, I was aware of the smell of urine, which I could not identify at the time. But it was coming from the jail in the basement of the city hall. That's probably my first recollection of doing anything in Boise.

[03:05] KENDALL SCHABER: What was the year of that could have been 1937.

[03:09] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: 38. 39. Somewhere in there. We were pretty much evacuees of the dust bowl in Colorado. I think we were able to eat because my mother was able to wait table in the chinese restaurant on Grove street between eight and 9th. She worked for a family named Louie. The last name was Louie. Years later, after the war and after school, my wife and I came back to Boise. And there was a new little enclose of one room buildings. They were just one room cottages. And we lived there until we were able to get a better place to live. It was coincidental that Albert Louie, whom I knew in high school, he and his wife also lived in one of those units. We were about three units separate. I found that kind of intriguing because it would have been his great great, maybe great great grandfather for whom my mother worked.

[04:58] KENDALL SCHABER: Dad, you know, dad was also kind of an evacuee. He grew up on a really hardscrabble farm, and the dust bowl blew them out. And he had been in and out of Boise for years. Cause his grandfather lived here. And when the family broke up in 37, he ended up in Boise. And his grandfather, who he adored, he said, I can either feed you or house you. I can't do both. Which, you know, I was shocked to hear that story, but it was such a common story at the time. And so dad opted for food as a growing teenager. He was pretty. That was a real focus of his. And he was, you know, remained committed to the. Why the rest of his life. Because the y gave him housing when he didn't have it. Because at that time, the YMCA had a. Had a dorm, and so he lived there part time. And he also had a night shift at the Inaha hotel. So he had a cot there. And when I said to him, you know, as we're. As we're, you know, walking around Boise and he's pointing things out, I said, dad, you were homeless in high school. And he said, yeah, I never even thought about that because we were all poor. Yeah, it was tough.

[06:17] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: Yeah. You referred to the YMCA. That was one of my hangouts. And interestingly, I never ran into your dad there. Early in the war, when. When drafties were coming through and they would house them in the YMCA overnight. They had a pool table and the northwest bank on that pool table, the bank was compromised near the pocket, and they didn't know that. And if you hit. If you hit the ball hard enough, it would dribble into the pocket. So we would win nickel games against draftees. And I remember when I was a senior in high school, there were three of us that ran together, and we played basketball at the YMCA, and we had an overnight stay. We stayed in one of the rooms in the YMCA, and we didn't do anything naughty. We just stayed up all night, went home in the morning.

[07:34] KENDALL SCHABER: Where was the dorm located?

[07:36] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: It was on 11th and Bannack. It was across the street from what would have been the. Oh, it was down a block from the First National Bank. Cc Anderson's across the street, 9th Street, 11th and Bannack. I think I'm right on that. Might have been 10th.

[08:03] KENDALL SCHABER: Well, I mentioned the war diaries that you have been so generous as to. To go over with me from dad's time in 44 and 45. And last night, I found an entry about you. And you know how hard it has been to transcribe this journal. Dad's handwriting was pretty difficult, and it's pretty weathered. But anyway, he had. This is May 19, 1944. And he had spent the day at the firing range, all day at Holly Field. This would have been Guadalcanal. And so he said, ran into Lawrence Sheesley last night. And old south Ender, one of Everett's pals, he's been out 19 months now in the Seabees. It was like running into the Fairview bridge out there. So great. And then he goes on to talk about, apparently, a gal that he was quite sweet on, named Eileen, had also been writing you. Apparently. Eileen was quite a prolific pen pal. Writer to the troops. Anyway, he had bought. He was grousing because he had spent $7.50 on a string of pearls for her. And it sounds like she was kind of playing the field.

[09:30] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: I think he might have been referring to Eileen Brewster. My dad and I batched together in the upstairs. I don't know what was called. It's a 1309 Hay street. Just a very narrow little single room at the end front of the house. And the bathroom was at the end of the hall. And there were two apartments on either side of that hallway. And we were in the front of the house. And the Brewster family, that's how they made their. That's how they got kept together during the depression, was renting to us other poor people. They lived in the bottom part of the house. There were two sisters, Eileen and Pauline Brewster. And that's the only one I can think of by that name.

[10:24] KENDALL SCHABER: Do you remember seeing dad when you. It's actually when I read this, I was so surprised. There's millions of you guys floating around the South Pacific. And heaven to run into somebody from Boise.

[10:34] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: His recollection. My recollection is better than him.

[10:39] KENDALL SCHABER: Oh, let's hear it. Let's hear your recollection.

[10:43] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: I did not know him in high school. And the first time I remember seeing him, I knew who he was. I knew him by his appearance. But the first time we had contact in the Pacific was on the island of Guam. He and two other people from Boise High School were in the same company in the third marine division.

[11:14] KENDALL SCHABER: Was that Bill hoobing?

[11:17] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: Bill Hoobing was not among them at that time. He was. I can't remember the name, but it was not Bill Hobie. I knew Bill Hobie. They came walking down the road past where we were camped. He didn't know what happened in those preceding months, but I. We had been detached from the Navy and attached to the Marine Corps. I had a Marine Corps address, Marine Corps clothing, the whole nine yards. And I'd already made the landing on Bougainville, November 1, 1943. They came walking down the road and we got together then, but that was the first. That was my first contact.

[12:12] KENDALL SCHABER: So that was after the assault on Guam. And dad had been injured in that, and he had been in the hospital.

[12:18] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: For months when I saw him. He had come back from Guadalcanal, but he still had scabs in his head, on the left side of his head and on his side all the way down. But he was quite, quite conversant. He was normal, as far as I could tell.

[12:40] KENDALL SCHABER: I think what came through in these diaries was how important home was, and that seeing somebody from home was like somebody throwing a life preserver, you know, to you. And the letters from home were just, you know, essential. And that comes through over and over again in these diary notes.

[13:05] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: I really don't know what to say about that. I have mixed. I have mixed feelings about the. Yeah, the whole experience.

[13:15] KENDALL SCHABER: So what about January 1945 in or 46 in Boise when you guys are all returning and you end up at Boise Junior College? What was that like?

[13:30] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: That was. I'll tell you, and then if it gets off, you can stop it. I got home on January 18, 1946, enrolled in Boise Junior College. January 19, 1946. Got my contact with the love of my life. I have to tell you about that. When she was about eleven years old and I was 14 in Elmgrove Park, I saw her ride across Sand Creek bridge on 24th and Irene Street. I was about a half a block away, and I saw this blonde thing come across that bridge, and she got closer and closer, and bingo, I said, that's the one. That's the one. And, of course, during all those ensuing years, I had not wherewithal to do anything or do anything about anything, but I always had the feeling and kept her in my. So I got back on. In Boise Junior College, 19 January. She was a student there. We began dating immediately. March 8. We were married of 1940, 619 46. So that then she. We had 34 years of marriage. The last two are pretty rough because she had cancer. Died March 15, 1980.

[15:18] KENDALL SCHABER: I think when I talk to people in their nineties that were at Boise Junior College, now Boise State, that January was a really special time. There was a. They keep talking about an air of optimism, and people were in a hurry. You and dad both said almost exactly the same thing is we were in a hurry to start our lives.

[15:42] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: Yeah. Yeah. And it was. It was interesting that they had a. An organization called the Veterans Club. I have a yearbook you may have. I think I showed it to you, showing a picture of we veterans in the club. Heavens to Betsy. If there was a club, I never knew about it. We just got our picture taken for a while. The first, I don't know, weeks, several weeks. A group of us would meet in the evening and get sloppy drunk. We'd go to different places around in Boise and meet, you know, some would congregate in one place and we'd latch up and we just made that loop. And after about a month of that, I had all I could take. I didn't want to. I didn't want to do that anymore. So I was fortunate to be able to marry the love of my life. That's what I did. I bailed out of the singles club. Boise Junior College. I think I mentioned this to you once before. The recollection I have with your dad. There was. He was. He was the picture boy. He showed up in pictures. He was involved in the yearbook, and he was involved in the play and things like that. I was married and I was not interested in the campus life. I don't know.

[17:43] KENDALL SCHABER: Well, Boise Junior College was, you know, as he said and you said, and actually, all of his friends had said the same thing. We were in a hurry to start our lives and to get the good jobs before other people got them. And so he. It was a very important time in his life at Boise Junior College because he was such a wallflower in high school. He was a stutterer in high school, and he moved a lot. I mean, the family was very dysfunctional, and it was very difficult to lay down roots. And so when he came back, just like everybody else, felt really lucky to be alive. And his favorite cousin, Everett Curley, had been killed on IWU. And that, that really changed his perspective. He was going to live forever at two. So I. I wanted to talk about when you guys graduated in 48, right, from Boise Junior College and, and you went on to Colorado college, and dad went to University of Iowa because he was going to be a. In journalism. So he went to J school, and he was just staggeringly unhappy there. And he realized that he couldn't write fast enough to be a journalist. And that was really devastating to him. And he reached out to you.

[19:16] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: I think we wrote back and forth. It's so long ago. You know, I just remember that he was struggling there. The environment in which I was privileged to be was scholastically still is superior. Very difficult. Didn't know that when I first went there. Didn't know how hard it would be, but it was very, very difficult. And in the process, convinced him to come join me at Colorado College. So we investigated the possibility of getting him in. It wasn't easy then. And now they only accept one in seven out of state applicants. But for some reason or other, we prevailed, and they accepted him, and he came. His roommate was from Canada, a hockey player. Colorado college had actually won the national championship. I think it was in 48. 48. Could have been 49.

[20:32] KENDALL SCHABER: Is this you and dad? On graduation day at Colorado College? I found that.

[20:38] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: No, that that could have been his roommate. His roommate was ver Wishart from Saskatchewan, Canada. On the hockey roster, there were 22 people on scholarships, athletic scholarships, only two of whom were from the United States. All the rest were from Canada. So that's why they won the national championship. I'd never seen a hockey game, and the first one I saw, I just went, bullies, they crash each other into those boards. I got. I. I got so involved in that. Shirley and I went to every home game, I think, right? And I got so involved one night that I got entangled with another spectator.

[21:28] KENDALL SCHABER: Oh, my.

[21:30] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: And the hockey game came to a close, and they came to that end of the arena, and they're watching us because we were having a bigger problem than they were having in those days. They didn't wear helmets.

[21:44] KENDALL SCHABER: I was going to say, no helmets.

[21:45] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: No helmets. The goalie had no helmet. One game, he got slashed across the front of his face with a skate. So they had to stop the game and took him back in the locker room, sewed him up, came back, and he went. Went back into the cage, and he was Roy Icola, and he was good enough that he made the Olympic hockey team.

[22:15] KENDALL SCHABER: I think you two poor kids from Boise, Idaho, ending up at Colorado college, a very elite liberal arts college, private liberal arts college. The GI bill made that possible. And I think dad forever was grateful, not only to the GI bill, but to you for getting him in, because. And me, I feel so privileged to be able to do this with you because it really changed the direction of his life. Being at Colorado College. The possibilities, you know, that he could see there, as opposed to know the. The environment in which he grew up was just. It's like the whole world had broken open for him. And that's because you got him in. You got him in after school, had already started. And he was forever grateful. And so am I.

[23:08] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: Well, he did good things for me, too. I think I told you about the time I cut my finger. I was fry cooking and I was slicing tomatoes rapidly and sliced an arterial in my little finger and squirted blood until I. The shift ended and I called him at, I don't know, 304:00 in the morning. And he came. Picked me up to the emergency room, got me stitched up. We, we reciprocated. Yeah, I'm really glad we studied together, too. He came to my apartment and I remember, I remember specific thing we were took. We took physiological psychology. Physiological psychology, that was the name of that group. Hard sucker. And we studied in our little dinky apartment. He came over, we tried the craminal that because it was hard. Oh, and we had another experience. We took a. I don't remember which class it was, but one of the things we. We were given a cap. They had an embalming area in the college, and then we were given a cat and we were to do something on the anatomy of that cat. We went up into the attic of the Palmer hall, the main building on the campus. We had a little space up there. They allowed us to operate on this cat and we wrote a term paper on that. I don't know what happened to it. So we sat up there and then way up in the top of the building in that little cubicle all by ourselves, and we dissected that cat. I don't remember what we wrote about. Now, we wrote the term paper jointly.

[25:13] KENDALL SCHABER: And you help each other through. Oh, yeah.

[25:18] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: That was. I think I told you it was a difficult transition coming from Boise Junior College into junior class status at that. And the best way I figured out to describe the difference was, at Boise Junior College, in the general psychology class, we learned a definition of the coefficient of correlation and the freshman class at Colorado College computed it a little bit different. Hugely, hugely different.

[25:57] KENDALL SCHABER: I. You know, I. My parents didn't have much use for the term the greatest generation. And so when I've asked people of your generation this question, you know, about how do you feel? You were part of a group that physically beat nazism, imperialism and nationalism, and everybody said the same thing. We had a job to do and we did it. But you also came back and informed the civil service. You were a service to others the rest of your lives. My parents were both public health workers, and, you know, they serve the population the rest of their lives to try to make a healthier and more equitable society. And so I think that, you know, there's certainly a lot to be said for the greatest generation. What do you think of that moniker?

[27:05] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: I think it's probably a misnomer. It was. It was brede in desperation, in desperate times. Not unusual to be a little bit hungry, certainly anxious because of insecurity. The service, for me was an opportunity to grow up and mature and hopefully qualify myself as a candidate worthy of my wife's acceptance. Because from, as I told you, from an early age, she was it for me. And the service allowed me to mature. My dad always told me, you've got to go to college. You've got to go to college. And at the time, I knew emotionally I was not prepared, nor because of emotional unpreparedness. Neither was I intellectually capable of doing it. I remember waking up after the first morning, landing on Bougainville, and it came as an inspiration. And I could almost hear the words, if I can do this, I can do anything. I can even go to college. Those exact words went through my mind. So it did, in some respects, did more for me. I think, of the benefits that came from surviving that GI Bill. GI Bill. The first house we had was a va loan for $7,000. You know, the good career. I had a. I had an exceptional career. It blows my mind. I can't tell you how grateful I am for being able to do what I grew into doing. And it was all a result of the benefits that came from surviving the war. And I didn't really. I don't know about others, but it never really dawned on me. I never appreciated the huge difference between John Wayne and the Penny theater. Playing a Marine Corps role, packing around a 30 caliber machine gun on his hip. You know, I had that immature concept of what it was all about until the bombardment started for the landing on Bougainville at 230 in the morning. And it dawned on me, ooh, this is not good. So it wasn't a matter of, it's difficult. It's difficult to, you know. Now I have one concept of patriotism. Now I have one feeling of saluting the flag. At the time, I was so immature, and I had a movie picture version of the better side of life than I'd lived, that I never really made the connection. I never, you know, and having survived it at all, can't dignify my part of that time as being greatest. It was a beneficiary, the greatest beneficiary of that generation. From nothing to something.

[31:58] KENDALL SCHABER: Humility is another one of those hallmarks of the greatest generation machinations.

[32:05] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: This is the way it was, really. Terms of self confidence, self esteem, self worth, less than nothing to eventually something, all of which had the foundation of. Of service, you know, not given in a mature understanding of what was involved.

[32:43] KENDALL SCHABER: Meg, and having lived through that experience, how do you see the embrace by some of the modern strong men? The thirties were about, you know, the elevation of strong men and totalitarian states. So what, what do you think when you see now kind of an embrace by some of a resurgence of the strongman?

[33:26] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: It kind of boils down to what one's concept of a strong man is. A strong man to some people, Tamir would be a bully. Simply stated, just a bully. A gentler, but still considered by some a strong man to me, an inept too, long term beneficiary of the political system, as opposed to being a genuine contributor. I think. I don't know if this is applicable or not. It occurred to me, the Colorado river running, running dry, running low, and the impact that will have on millions of people and what we do about that. And so when I think of leaders, great men, contributors, I don't hear anybody. I've seen it on the news several times, but I've never heard anybody in a position to try to do something about it, say anything about it, let alone what will we do when suddenly millions of people cannot survive where they are. What do we do? I think. I think I, without going into politics, I go back. Eisenhower, man, for the time, even though I played a lot of golf, and it's easy to belittle that aspect, at least he provided an image, whether it was a real or not, it provided a positive image. And I don't see that now. I don't see it anywhere, anytime, for some time. Jack Kennedy, as an example of moral behavior, not the best, but when the chips were down in the war, he was there and he brought that, whether it was real or an imagined thing to attribute to him, he brought that with him. So Eisenhower, Kennedy, I don't see. I don't see anything, not even close, just not. Not on the spectrum.

[36:36] KENDALL SCHABER: I hope the next greatest generation is Gen. Z. I'm betting my brains out on them because they've got a lot of work to do. So. But I thought a lot about the greatest, the moniker, the greatest generation. And I feel a debt of gratitude towards you and my dad and my mother and those that came before, because you created a stable democracy through your service to others and institutions that endure. And so I just feel so privileged to be able to have the opportunity to talk to you about this and also to tell you, you know, I've said it before. You, your presence in my dad's life just really changed. The ripple effect has been enormous. It's changed in the trajectory of our family. And so we all owe you a great deal of gratitude.

[37:40] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: Divine design.

[37:42] KENDALL SCHABER: Divine design. We'll go with that. Thank you, Mac. I really appreciate this.

[37:47] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: Kendall, I love you.

[37:48] KENDALL SCHABER: Love you, too.

[37:51] LAWRENCE SHEESLEY: That's it.