Steven Senger and Philip Senger

[00:02] STEPHEN SENGER: My name is Stephen Sanger age 39. Today's date is Saturday, April 23, 2022. Our location is the Ozarks, Missouri. The name of my interview partner is Philip Singer and I am his son.

[00:21] PHILIP SENGER: I am Philip Singer I am 78 years old. Today is Saturday, April 23, 2022. Location, the Ozarks, the state of Missouri. My interview partner is Stephen Singer and he is my son. I am his father.

[00:53] STEPHEN SENGER: Derived by context. So, dad, I guess I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the stories from your childhood that might be a little bit peculiar or stand out from what someone might see in a history book or what might be in a newsreel. So I had a list of a few funny, maybe not humorous, but a few peculiar stories. So I wanted to maybe run through a few of these and see if you could recount. So I think a fun one to start with, fun in quotes again, would be the story about the unwanted visitor that you had that your dad escorted out of the house.

[01:36] PHILIP SENGER: Well, dad didn't really escort him out of the house. The family lived in my city of birth, Rock Island, Illinois. The family was very poor. We lived in a less than wonderful neighborhood. Dad was an ocean picture projectionist and highly skilled trade, but pay wasn't very much any old how. Dad worked seven days a week. Shift rotated every week. Day shift started about noon. Evening shift ran started about 530 or six, probably 06:00 p.m. dad relied on public transportation to get to and from work. He worked at a theater in Rock island. Anyhow, on the week in question, this was in the late 1940s. A dad was home, sleeping away along with my mom and my, me and my younger brother in the half of the duplex that we occupied. The bedrooms were on the second floor. Well, during the night, somebody came in a second story window, and dad became aware of this, and he got his pistol, a Colt model 19, eight, vest pocket, 25 caliber. No, it's not a fighting gun. It had been a backup piece for a prohibition agent, and the family had gotten it. His father had swapped off some fishing gear to the fellow who was now an ex pro high agent, and eventually my dad wound up with it anyhow. So he grabbed the gun and confronted the intruder and told him to leave the premises and to go out at the window he had come in. Now, dad Washington, relatively short. He was about five seven, maybe five'eight max. Slight build. But thanks to his trade, he was a lot stronger than he looked. And having grown up in a family even more dysfunctional than dysfunctional, than the one he headed. I can imagine that he was pretty much foaming at the mouth, angry. And I know what that looked like because I saw it a lot. Anyhow, the guy went out the window, and nobody ever came back to hassle the place. Well, the next week, dad was working nights, and there was a family owned neighborhood bar about maybe two blocks from the house, three blocks. Sometimes dad would get off the bus a block early and go down to the bar for a cold beer before walking the rest of the way home. When he walked in that night the following week of the incident, somebody sang out, hey, I hear you chased x, the name of the burglar, out of your house at gunpoint. Dad laconically replied, yeah, that's right. Well, what kind of gun was that? And dad, in a very flat voice, just said, there's one way to find out. The bar went silent for 1015 seconds, and then the usual hubbub conversations, orders for another round resumed. As I said, the house was never bothered after that. It's the kind of neighborhood where, basically, you had to be ready to kill to live an undisturbed life. Oh, by the way, the neighborhood elementary school was right across the street from the house, from the duplex, Longfellow elementary, and it's still in use today. Funny thing about that school. It opened in 1934. People of Rock island, the citizens of Rock Island, I voted for the taxes, voted the bond issue to build that school that I entered in September of 1948 for kindergarten. Those people, many of them, didn't know where the next rent check was coming from, but they had faith in the future, and they backed it up with their I. Commitment to a bond issue. Okay, Stephen?

[07:59] STEPHEN SENGER: Well, while you're talking about childhood, I think it might be fun to follow that one up with the motorcyclists who were eager about cutting the corner across the lawn and how that was dealt with, if you can recall, for the. For the imagined audience.

[08:19] PHILIP SENGER: In February of 1951, my parents, having borrowed the down payment, moved to a home that they had contracted for in the west end of Davenport, Iowa, the city right across from Rock island, right across the Mississippi river from Rock island. They had moved for various reasons, but obviously for a little better neighborhood and to be closer to potential employment in other theaters. Well, it was on a corner lot, and a lot of effort went into establishing the lawn for that house. The dirt had been pushed out of the back of the lot, and the point of that was to build up a relatively higher place which to put the house. Okay, so lots of effort to establish a garden in the back and this lawn in front. Well, one of the ways to protect that lawn was to put a fence that ran roughly from the. The post for the street sign that identified the intersected streets that intersected back to the house. Well, dad put one up a stretch of wire fence and light duty posts. Okay. Well there were some folks in the area who liked to ride motorcycles. That's cool. But they liked to ride the motorcycles across corner lots and dad didn't take very kindly to that. So after several attempts to put to maintain a fence, dad got creative. Got some angle irons, pieces of angle irons about 6ft long. Reinforced them with black pipe for natural gas or plumbing. The pipe was about inch and a quarter, perhaps outside diameter, maybe an inch, but about a three quarter inch bore. And. Well, first it was just the angle iron. The angle iron didn't stand up very well. So he reinforced it with these pipes. And of course that had to be challenged. And by the way, dad had always marked the fence with aluminum painted plates about four by six. So nobody could say I didn't know that it was there. Well, this time the miscreant who decided to challenge the fence wound up going up and then back. What is it? Tail over tip, as the Brits might say. The next day the attempt at the fence occurred at night. Of course, that was the time to do things. The miscreants mother reported at the front door and threatened all kinds of things. And dad told her it was private property and she could soon be damned. Nothing came of it. Oddly enough.

[12:52] STEPHEN SENGER: I like that one.

[12:56] PHILIP SENGER: This was hearing this, you might. Let's just say that for the low end of the blue collar class, low end of the white blue collar class, life was pretty direct and pretty rough. As a child, among my male peers, my social standing depended on, crucially two things. How well could I fight? What was my sports prowess? I was negligible in both categories, so life was less than pleasant. Whether in my parents home or at the Roman Catholic parochial school that I attended second through 8th grade. Okay, I like that one.

[14:07] STEPHEN SENGER: Maybe we've got a whole bunch of these. But maybe, dad, you could recount the go kart incident.

[14:15] PHILIP SENGER: I think that's a fun one too. Go kart incident. Okay, this is before I got a driver's license. I got my driver's license in summer of 1990, 59. That's when I turned 16. Anyhow, some friends of mine at the junior high that I attended in 9th grade and then on to high school. I think this probably goes back to maybe sophomore year in high school, before I got my license anyhow, we had go karts. Well, go karts were common, and they were usually powered by home modified McCulloch chainsaws. Chainsaw engines. Pardon me. You could buy those engines, and then you could, with files and other hand tools, you could significantly modify the engines for higher horsepower and torque. And, yes, they would wind. You could wind up one of those things to 10,000, 12,000 revolutions per minute. I bought points and plugs and contributed to the purchase of points and plugs and oil and gasoline. Okay, we're out at the Davenport cart course at Mount Joy, and we, the three or four of us, did not formally race. We were just out there running around, having fun on track. I have strabismus, which means I see a flat world. I have very poor eye hand coordination, fine motor control, etcetera. So when I work, when I drive as an adult, I work pretty hard. Well, I was having fun, and I didn't know much about driving. I had not had driver ed, a local pediatric orthodontist, had a son, and the young man was small for his age, and daddy had bucks. So daddy had this youngster in, maybe the kid was ten, in this high performance cart. He had a power to weight ratio that none of us could hope to match. But he was the guy out there running, and I called it rat racing. If somebody's out there and they're ahead of you, well, you chase them. For the record, I spun out of every turn on that track except the last one, when came out of the last turn, ran down the straight, headed for the first turn. Well, somewhere in the middle of that, there was a hairpin, two very sharp hairpins, and I'm lead footing it. And the doc's son was still going, and I was still going. Unfortunately, doc was standing on the outside of the hairpin, which is a terribly dangerous place to be. He was trying to coach his son on the fine points of getting through that hairpin. I guess I spun out, and Doc had to jump. I went squarely under him. He jumped vertically. He was in good physical condition. If he had not, I probably would have killed him. That would have wiped out my parents financially, and it would have been a major blow to Doc's family, to his practice, etcetera. But there it was. You had an irresponsible parenthood with an unskilled kid driving a vehicle that he didn't know how to drive. And then you have somebody, a kid who's supposedly definitely older and supposedly more mature, and whom I admit had spun out often enough to know that his driving capabilities were just not the best. So all three of us were irresponsible fools who nearly wound up with my being guilty of manslaughter. And at the very least, it was a sobering experience for me. And I hope it was a sobering experience for Doc and his son.

[19:55] STEPHEN SENGER: Speaking of Doc, maybe you could tell the story about doc staats.

[20:00] PHILIP SENGER: Oh, yes. My father wrote, used public transportation when he could. Automobiles were expensive to operate, et cetera. And consequently, he met a lot of people, different walks of life. Anyhow, he made the acquaintance of a local chiropractor. Palmer College of Chiropractic is in Davenport, Iowa. Basically. Oversimplification. Taylor's bone cracking was bifurcated. One half of it developed into osteopathy, the other half developed or devolved, as my mom would say, the rn to chiropractic. Okay, fair enough. Doc was driving his car across the centennial bridge between Davenport and Rock island when he stopped at the toll booth. Somebody leaped from. Or maybe he was paused by the red light at the entrance to the bridge. I think it was paused at the red light on the Davenport site. Anyhow, a fellow came in, entered his car without his consent, and door locks were not automatic back in those days. Well, doc had this person who was bent on mayhem, basically robbery. But doc, as a chiropractor, had considerable upper body strength. So while driving across the centennial bridge, four lane bridge, two lanes on each side, he maintained control of the vehicle, kept it moving, and threw the guy out of the driver's side window. And the toll takers were kind of when they saw this fellow emerge, somewhat violent life from the driver's side. It was a shock to all, but Doc just went on with his business. What happened to the fellow who came out of the car? We don't know or care. Broad daylight, by the way. Okay.

[23:11] STEPHEN SENGER: Yeah, I like those stories. I thought I would share a story about when you met my wife for the first time. So you recall I met hime in 2013. And then, you know, she flew me down to Mexico to meet her parents in November. And then she and I drove to meet you and mom in December around Christmas time. And I had, it was our family Christmas dinner, because I'm a little weird. I decided, you know, I hadn't had told anyone yet, but I decided I was going to disrupt Christmas dinner. And I said, oh, hey, mom, dad, we got matching tattoos. And mom in her, you know, kind but exacerbated voice said, steve. And she just sort of shook her head. And you, of course, with curiosity. You said, well, what did you get? And I responded, guess just no way he's going to get this thing. And you and I will impersonate you just to get the timing down approximately like this. You said.

[24:23] PHILIP SENGER: Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.

[24:27] STEPHEN SENGER: And I started laughing because maybe he may have posted about it on Facebook or something, because, yeah, I had designed a, you know, little Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. And so I looked over at him and like, oh, did you tell him, or did you post this on Facebook? She was sort of flabbergasted. And they said, how did you guess that? And your response, I'll never forget you just said, I have a weird brain. But you later explained your reasoning.

[24:55] PHILIP SENGER: Yeah, it's one of the national symbols of Mexico. One thing I think I should point out is that life, for those of us at the start of the cold War, was if you paid attention. And I did. I was a weird kid, I admit, but I paid attention as best I could to international and national affairs. My parents had a radio, and they listened to the news as best they could. And we understood with, at age five, I understood what the a bomb was and what it could do. Now, what can you do about that when you're five? Nothing. So you get on your tricycle and get on with life. By the way, I was attending public school at the time, and the duck and cover drills came later. Contemporaries would find this strange, but all of us, in one way or another, knew that we were living under a terrible threat. Now, the quad City area was not a first strike target. There was a lot of heavy manufacturing, still is. The rock island arsenal was there, railroad bridges, highway bridges. But probably the best way to think about that area is to think about it. It wasn't a prime target like Hiroshima. Think of us as Nagasaki. The prime target is socked in. Well, hit one on the number two. What's number two? What's number three? That's in. But we were living on a bullseye, and we knew that. And we got, each of us, regardless of age, knew that, and then went on with the tasks and joys of childhood, adolescence, adult responsibilities and so on. It was a unique time, and let's not repeat it. What else do you have in mind, Steven?

[28:06] STEPHEN SENGER: Let's see, five minutes. Maybe you could talk about if you remember the story about. I can't remember who it was, but maybe it might have been you and Charlie and Dwayne, or maybe it was somebody else that was into. Oh, you should talk about what you called your model rockets when they didn't work.

[28:31] PHILIP SENGER: Oh, let's just say that Sputnik was a shock. That fall of 1957, the Russians, they cant make a tractor that works, and theyre tremendously evil, godless communism, etcetera. And they have an artificial satellite. And then later, when Yuri Gagarin went up, the first man to orbit the earth. What's going on here? Well, those of us who had some ambitions of bettering ourselves through acquiring skills, whether it be through trade, apprenticeships or formal education, followed this new technology. And it was fun to play with and forbidden by my parents, of course. So there was the forbidden fruit angle. No, I'm not going to discuss propellants or other things like that unless somebody tread in our foolish footsteps. But the way I looked at the rockets that we made, there were firecrackers if they blew up. There were rockets if they went up. And it was, we had fun, but we were trying to learn and we were doing the best we could do with the information that was publicly available. We didn't have access to the relevant engineering texts and we wouldn't have understood them if we'd had them. But we had fun and occasionally endangered ourselves unreasonably. Once again, don't try this yourself. You can get seriously, seriously injured. Okay, wrap up. What do you have to say? What do we do?

[31:05] STEPHEN SENGER: Just like talking to you. I think you've got interesting things to say, and I'm grateful that we could get a nice, high quality recording of your recollections.

[31:14] PHILIP SENGER: Well, I hope this series goes on to examine in detail to get people to talk about the things that don't go into the public record. If everything goes right.

[31:36] STEPHEN SENGER: I think after you get just the basic lay of the land for history or whatever, if you can get a sense of who the people were, then I think you can get a greater appreciation for what's the same and what's not the same same. So, yeah, grateful for your time.

[31:59] PHILIP SENGER: Thank you for your work.