Voices of the Past Record

Historic Preservation Committee

Oral History

Frank Wiswall was interviewed in his home in Boonton by John Grossmann and Tom Dagger on June 24, 2011.

John Grossmann:	You’re 92 years old?
Frank Wiswall:	I’ll be 92 in September but I feel like I’m 94 today. I was born in 1919.
JG:	Was your family living in Mountain Lakes when you were born?
FW:	No, we were living in Brooklyn, like most of the kids in my era. They were all born in Brooklyn, it seemed. My parents moved to Mountain Lakes in about 1920. I have pictures that were taken in 1920, so I’m sure I was in Mountain Lakes in 1920.
JG:	What caused your parents to move from Brooklyn to Mountain Lakes?
FW:	To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I was a little too young to understand. I was in diapers at the time.
JG:	It wasn’t your Dad’s job? What was his profession?
FW:	He was a salesman. He worked for E.N. Campe Corporation, 350 Broadway.
JG:	What did they do?
FW:	Linen goods. My dad was a crack salesman. He had one big account, F.W. Woolworth’s and in those days, F.W. Woolworth’s was big business. Dad worked there for some years. There was a brother in the company. He was very jealous of the status of my father and my father was let go early in the Depression. These are the years that I went through. My whole family did. In fact, my Dad ultimately lost his home in Mountain Lakes.
JG:	Let’s put that aside now and come back to that in a few minutes. Did your mother work?
FW:	No.
JG:	You were one of how many children?
FW:	I had one brother five years older and another brother five years younger and had two brothers that died in infancy.
JG:	Tell us where your house was here in town.
FW:	It was 80 Melrose Road. I have a beautiful picture of that home.
JG:	Why don’t you take it out. It will probably help you with some memories and maybe you can point to your bedroom window.
FW:	The top floor burned out many years ago and they rebuilt it, and to me the house was never the same.
JG:	That was after your family moved away, right?
FW:	Yes. I don’t know who lived in there when the top burned off.
JG:	Do you know if your family was the second or third owner of the house?
FW:	We were the original owners.
JG:	So it wasn’t built until 1920?
FW:	The original bill of sale, I had all of that, and unfortunately over the years I think it may have disappeared. I also have a picture of the house right across the street from us. Okay, this is my Dad’s house.
JG:	Where was your bedroom?
FW:	My bedroom was in the back of the house; behind me was the woods. Pretty dead down in there. The YMCA is now over here. I had a room of my own up in the attic and the reason I asked my mother if I could have it was I loved to go to sleep with the peepers. You never hear the peepers anymore. I don’t know if you know what peepers are?
JG:	I was about to ask you.
FW:	Young frogs. And there were a million of them down there in those days. They sing you a song like you’ve never heard. That’s why I slept upstairs.
JG:	Is number 80 the address today?
FW:	No, 80 Melrose was the original address and I think it was changed to 44. What it might be now, I don’t know. It was right on the corner of Oakland and Melrose.
JG:	Tell us some of your other memories of the house.
FW:	My Dad did a lot of things. He had a beautiful home. He had a beautiful garden. There were all dirt roads in those days. People would come from as far as New York and park in front of the house and ask my Dad if he’d mind if they could walk through our property. That’s how pretty it was. Over in the far corner of the yard Dad had built a little clock golf course, a hole here, a hole here, 12 holes all the way around and you fired from the middle.
JG:	Like a miniature golf course?
FW:	Yeah, but they called it clock golf.
JG:	Had you heard of clock golf, Tom?
Tom Dagger:	No. Never.
FW:	These [pointing to the picture] were canna lillies. I thought they were beautiful flowers. My wife is a flower lover. Dad had a beautiful yard. He built bridges over the brook. We had a brook that came across Melrose Road from Hanover Road, which was the road above us. Dad built from that brook... .he had one... two... three pools, which were rather large in size. A rock garden around all of them. Dams. He built two bridges. Later on he built a bridge across the brook that ran by the clock golf course. But it was a beautiful home. It broke his heart when he lost it.
JG:	Maybe we should talk about that now. How did you come to lose the house?
FW:	Dad lost his job and I guess... originally, we had two maids, a live in maid and we had a daily maid.
JG:	The live-in maid must have been up on the third floor with your bedroom?
FW:	Yeah, Beatrice. She later became the maid of people down on Briarcliff road. They were related to the Writes, who lived on Briarcliff, right opposite the old firehouse. I digress every now and then, so always pull me back on track.
JG:	So back to your Dad losing his job. He lost his job in this company squabble of sorts.
FW:	Dad kept going and he went on his own and for a while, he maintained the connection that he had with F.W. Woolworth. He had his own little plant down near Atlantic City. But eventually, as the Depression grew and grew so did the job get lower and lower and finally that didn’t produce what Dad was cut out to be. I guess he overextended, like an awful lot of people in Mountain Lakes in those days.
TD:	He borrowed against the house?
FW:	I still remember my mother and my younger brother Bert were going to Massachusetts to visit his parents. I was fortunate. I had three grandfathers. I had two grandfathers and one great grandfather... Here’s one of the bridges that my Dad built over one of the pools. He built it of stone and concrete. He could do anything, my Dad. This is to the rear of our property. It was a rather large lot.
JG:	Is that bridge still there?
FW:	Yes, it’s still there. In July of one of the years we had a terrific rainstorm and the water came through all of his pools and went over the top of that bridge and Dad inscribed in the concrete later on, water ran over this bridge on a certain date. Here is where all of Dad’s work was (pointing on the photograph) with the pool. There was a small stream than came in from over here and it was from here on down that was Dad’s playground.
JG:	What about your playground as a boy?
FW:	(laughs) Well, it was pretty big. My father was a man of many gardens and between my brother Fred, who was five years older, he and I -- my younger brother Bert was too small -- we had certain sections of the property that my Dad had doled out to us, that was ours to care for and keep. We had the gardens, cut the grass. I used to get a penny for every 10 weeds that I pulled out of the driveway.
JG:	Is that right?
FW:	Oh, I love thinking back to Mountain Lakes. Of course I graduated from Boonton High, but my heart was always in Mountain Lakes. It never left.
JG:	So as a boy, you went to Lake Drive School?
FW:	Yes. Maybe you gentlemen can find out because you’re on, I call it the Hysterical board, the date. Now I graduated from Mountain Lakes public school. I have the class book somewhere. I went through ninth grade in Mountain Lakes. I started in kindergarten, but being born in September my parents put me in kindergarten just before I became five. I was in kindergarten for a couple of weeks and then I became five and got an immediate promotion to first grade. In essence I went from kindergarten through nine years of public school in Mountain Lakes.
JG:	I’m not sure I follow. So you started kindergarten at age four, almost five. You turned five, but you didn’t stay in kindergarten?
FW:	No, I was too old for kindergarten.
JG:	At five you were too old for kindergarten back then? You had a two-week kindergarten career? That was it?
FW:	That was it. This is my kindergarten class. (shows photo)
JG:	Which boy are you in this picture?
FW:	Right here.
JG:	Second from the right. You don’t have a tie on like some of the boys. You’ve got high lace up shoes, which seems like everyone is wearing back then. Looks like you’ve got a little bit of the devil in your eye there?
FW:	No. No. Not me.
JG:	What were you like as a boy?
FW:	In what respect?
JG:	Were you a good student? Did you go out for athletics?
FW:	If I had my school life to live over I would have studied. When I was a young kid I had a leaning towards sports. That’s all I was really interested in. My parents were good parents. I would never belittle them but they never really made me study. And so all through my life, right up until the time I got into the service, I really missed out on education. Because all I was interested in when I was in school, to cut it short, was sports and girls. That’s all I was interested in. A lot of the fellows were the same. Some of my cronies were the same, so when two of you get together then you’re both down the road.
JG:	Which sports did you play and what were sports like in Mountain Lakes back then?
FW:	The first gym teacher that I can remember, her name was Miss LaHart She was a teacher and we would have our gym outside in the schoolyard. She wore great black bloomers. It took us a long while before we could watch Miss LaHart do her exercises for us to follow without laughing, especially me. I always had a laugh that got me in trouble. All through my life, it got me in trouble. Still does, every now and then.
JG:	See, didn’t I see that in your eyes in the picture?
FW:	You saw the nice glint.
JG:	Were there formal athletics for eight graders, ninth graders?
FW:	I never had intramural sports. Looking back, I know we used to play soccer and baseball. And basketball in the gym and that was always rough because Mountain Lakes public school gym, if you shot at the basket nine times out of ten you’d hit the ceiling. You couldn’t loft the ball.
JG:	You’re talking about the gym downstairs at Lake Drive School?
FW:	Yes.
JG:	There was soccer, even back then?
FW:	Every now and then we played soccer. Yes.
JG:	What field did you play on?
FW:	The field was right alongside of the school. There was a little path between hedgerows and we used to cut across and climb the stairs up to the Club, and for a nickel you could get a nice ice cream.
JG:	You don’t remember a croquet court on the property of the Club, do you?
FW:	No.
JG:	The reason I ask, is that in the early prospectuses they talked about planning to have croquet at the Club, but I’ve never seen a picture, never seen a reference to games being played.
FW:	In Mr. Dennis’ yard we had a little croquet place. It was very small. But I never saw croquet at the Club, only tennis.
JG:	So there really wasn’t formal athletics for young boys and girls?
FW:	Negative. None. For a while, they used to call it the Hi Y -- The Hi Y used to come in around basketball time. They were bigger fellows, bigger than we were and they would use the gym to play basketball and sometimes have competitive basketball, but not with the school.
JG:	For recreation purposes, then, a boy growing up in town, with the lakes, with the woods, did you roam freely?
FW:	Sometimes it’s hard to remember how we spent our time. You had your group of friends, and whatever they did, you did. That’s the way we went. I wouldn’t say we were all angels. I would say the things we did when we were kids, we got a big enjoyment out of. We weren’t destructive. Well, I can tell you one quick story. When Mr. Dennis set me straight. I remember there was another fellow and myself, we’d always go to the Girl Scouts meeting and peek in the windows. You know how you can peek in the windows at Lake Drive School down in the gym? I don’t know how it is now.
JG:	How old are you at this time?
FW:	Maybe 11, 12, maybe old enough to know better. This one night we did that. I started walking home. Everyone walked in those days. No one had rides. And in those days if you went to the hardware store, they had a big bin, and for a nickel you could buy little staples and if you took one of those staples and a rubber band and pulled it back you had a perfect slingshot with the staples. And this one night, I got wise and I broke two streetlights. I kept walking towards home. I’ll never forget this. I got down Melrose Road near my house and there was this car parked alongside the road. I heard this voice. I can still hear it: “Frank. Come over here a minute.” It was Mr. Dennis.
JG:	Mr. Dennis, the police chief.
FW:	Yes. Well, I almost fainted. He said, “Now we both know what you did on your way home. I want to give you two choices. You can go in and tell your Dad all about it.” My father was on the volunteer fire squad, so he knew my father. “Or you can give me your word you’ll never do it again.” You know what I did. That’s the kind of a man he was. He was a good man all the way around to all the kids. I remember one night we went up and rang the church bell. It was a wide open door. Never locked. This time we rang the bell we saw a car coming toward The Community Church. It was me and another fellow. We went into the church -- when you’re facing the church on the left there are classrooms away from the church part of the building. I went to third grade there because the public school was so filled we didn’t have the room so we went to the Community Church. Well, I’m not sure it was third grade, but one of those grades. Now, after we rang the church bell, now right alongside that classroom there was a bathroom, so the other fellow and myself ran into the bathroom and we got behind the door. Pretty soon, a searchlight came in. It was Mr. Dennis. He opened the door right on us. Gave it a little push, letting us know he was out there and he waited and then he walked away. He knew there were a couple of kids behind that door.
JG:	They don’t make police chiefs like that anymore.
FW:	Mr. Dennis used to stand -- there used to be a blinker light right at the Boulevard and Lake Drive and Mr. Dennis used to stand there every morning. He rode a motorcycle -- he didn’t live on Hanover Road then, but anyway -- I always walked to school and I was always early and I remember Mr. Dennis always let me go to his motorcycle and there was a little button on the front by the speedometer and if you hit that button the pointer would go back to zero. I would do that and I would go stand alongside of Mr. Dennis while he directed traffic until he told me the traffic was getting a little rougher and I ought to go back down to school. I used to do that every morning.
JG:	You mean a reset button for the odometer?
FW:	No, the speedometer. If he went 30 miles an hour on the way to the school, the highest speed he went, that’s where it would stop. If you pressed this little button it would reset to zero and that was a big deal, to sit on his motorcycle and push that thing down.
JG:	What else do you remember about Lake Drive School? You went home for lunch?
FW:	I remember in those days I had a little scooter and I would take that scooter and ride right down the Boulevard. Sometimes I’d take Oakland down, but usually I would take Powerville down and you could coast down those hills and then take Melrose. These were dirt roads.
JG:	Nothing was paved in those days?
FW:	The Boulevard had maybe one and a half track of tar, I guess. If you pin me down, I’d only be guessing.
JG:	The Boulevard Trolley was running?
FW:	The Trolley was off to the side.
JG:	You must have ridden that a few times? What do you remember about that?
FW:	For five cents you could get on anyplace in Mountain Lakes and ride as far as it went. It was still in Mountain Lakes in those days. The tracks ended right where Fanny Road is now.
TD:	It didn’t go on through to Boonton?
FW:	When it did, it cost you another nickel. I forget when the trolleys were taken down but it seems to me that I used to ride on the trolley from Mountain Lakes into Boonton because I used to catch the train to New York for a while in Boonton. And then for a while I caught it from Mountain Lakes to New York.
JG:	Besides Police Chief Dennis, whom you’ve spoken about in glowing terms, were there other people in town who made an impression upon you?
FW:	We all had our favorites. I know he later on turned out to be a disappointment. We all looked up to him but I’d rather not go into that. You most likely heard it from other people. It was a shame because he was such a good teacher and he was always good with kids, but he left town in disgrace.
JG:	On the positive side?
TD:	You were in Boy Scouts weren’t you? Was it Troop 2 back then?
FW:	It was Troop 41 when I was a bugler.
TD:	How many years were you active?
FW:	I was there about as long as they would keep me, I guess. They always used to find my bugle. I didn’t have it with me all the time. And stuff handkerchiefs in it. And Mr. Sewell, who was the Scout Master at that time, he always talked through his teeth. When the Scout meeting was over he’d say, “Bugler, take your position.” And I’d have to walk and get out in front, turn around. And he’d say, “Sound off.” This one night I went to sound off. I couldn’t. So everybody’s laughing and of course, when everybody laughs, I laugh along with them. So I got in trouble with Mr. Sewell a little bit on that, I think. He most likely thought I did it, but I didn’t. He was a good man. I think he had infantile paralysis in his youth and he had a game leg. If you went up from the public school and made a right turn on the Boulevard, he lived in the first house on the right.
JG:	What did you do as a Boy Scout troop back then? What are your memories of being a Boy Scout in Mountain Lakes?
FW:	Well, number one, I had two bad memories. I was anxious to get places in Scouts and I couldn’t swim and I still don’t swim to this day, believe it or not. That’s because when I was much younger, Dad was a member of the Wildwood beach. They threw me in the water and I choked on water. Then I had to learn--in order to go from a Tenderfoot to Second Class, you had to learn to swim and the Morse code--and I could never master that Morse code. I just couldn’t do it. So I never got any further than a Tenderfoot, but I stayed in Scouts a few years. I enjoyed Scouts.
TD:	Did you go on campouts?
FW:	Yes.
JG:	Where were the campouts?
FW:	In the Tourne, normally, or there was a place in Boonton Township, they called it Ross’s Cabin, an empty house up there and we used to go up there for overnights. I remember there was a gentleman by the name of Mr. Danamon that lived in Mountain Lakes. He was another one of the men who did an awful lot for the boys. He didn’t have any boys himself. It was just he and his wife. But whenever there was an overnight he was always up there with a great big kettle of soup or this or that.
TD:	Where did the Troop meet back then?
FW:	In the public school, St. John’s, the Community Church. We met anyplace we could meet. It usually changed around. I remember one of my classmates, Don Janseen. He lives in Texas now, he made Eagle Scout. And there was another kid by the name of Fred Tears. He also made Eagle Scout. If I’m not mistaken, I think Mr. Sewell eventually also became an Eagle Scout. Whether it was an honorary one or not, I don’t remember. And since that time, I’ve had the honor to make two presentations, one to a fellow, I call him my nephew, he formerly lived in Mountain Lakes and they moved to Randolph. He made Eagle Scout and I helped him with that. And another one, and when they became Eagles Scouts they asked me if I would present it to them. In those days, well I’m still the same way, I don’t like speechifying. Not in front of people, if I can avoid it. It was an honor to me, because I never got any further than Tenderfoot. And then the funny thing, a quick one. I got in... no I won’t say that now... cause I wanted to get in the Air Corps and the only way I could do it, I had to be able to send and receive five words a minutes both in semaphore and the Morse Code -- I did it in less than two weeks, I was doing five words a minute on the Morse Code.
JG:	When you had to, you could learn it.
FW:	Yeah, but I couldn’t handle learning how to swim.
JG:	Did your family belong to the Mountain Lakes Club?
FW:	My Dad did, originally, when we first moved to Mountain Lakes. I remember standing in the bathroom of this house and watching the Mountain Lakes Club burn. I also watched the Austin House on Hanover house burn to the ground.
JG:	When the Club burned it was a spectacular blaze.
FW:	I don’t remember if my Dad went or not, but he was on the volunteer fire department. I remember he had a badge and every now and then when he wasn’t looking I would take it and put it on.
JG:	Let’s go back to the sad event, when your family had to move from the house. That was in the depths of the Depression? What year, do you remember? We know, from other accounts that the Depression was a very hard time for families in Mountain Lakes. To hear your story would be very instructive.
FW:	I can remember the Depression and we went through the depths of it.
JG:	How did it impact your family, Frank?
FW:	Well, as far as me personally. We were a pretty close-knit family, always. I always say and still say it made me a better person for having gone through it, because it taught me to think before you move. We never had a TV until we could afford it. In fact, I even bought my house insurance on the phone yesterday and asked them why the devil, when they sent me my new homeowner’s policy, Bank of America is listed as the first mortgagee. Nobody holds any mortgage on me. I called the insurance company and they said they don’t know how it got on there.
JG:	But as a young boy during the Depression, how aware we you that things were getting increasingly tight?
FW:	By wearing other kids’ clothes. You just name anything, when you either have the money to do this or pay your bills, which my Dad unfortunately didn’t, the whole family feels it. It’s awful. Awful.
JG:	Where did money for food come from?
FW:	To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think I ever went really hungry. I don’t know if it was charity from within Mountain Lakes or what it was, I don’t know. But then we lost our house and Dad was able to rent 9 Cobb Road. We stayed there for a year or so, until the early thirties.
JG:	Do you remember moving or how your parents broke the news to you? Did you know at that time that the family had lost the house?
FW:	I knew. And that was the only home I’d ever known.
TD:	You stayed in school in Mountain Lakes through ninth grade, so you were still living here then?
FW:	I had friends that lived right near where Neffi’s Field was. The Green family lived down there and I was buddies with one of the family members there and I had a short amount of time to go and get out of Boonton High School and I moved in with them and stayed with them. I remember Miss Dunn had the bus tickets for me to get to and from Boonton. Whether that was charity or not I don’t know, because Dad wasn’t paying any Mountain Lakes taxes for me at that time, so don’t squeal on me. But I graduated from Boonton High School.
JG:	So when you were living with the Green family down in what’s now the Village, was your family renting at Cobb Road at the time or had they left Mountain Lakes?
FW:	I would guess we stayed maybe two years at Cobb Road, maybe a little longer.
JG:	And then your family went someplace else but you finished high school by staying with the Greens. So where did your family go?
FW:	They moved to, I can’t remember now to be honest, whether they moved to Mine Hill or whether they moved down to that road that parallels Route 46 at the end of Mountain Lakes.
TD:	Is it Fox Hill Road?
FW:	I don’t know.
JG:	But we can say your family moved out of town at that point. Never to move back?
FW:	Never to move back.
JG:	When did you graduate from Boonton High?
FW:	1937.
JG:	What did you do after graduation?
FW:	I had a Sunday school teacher that lived in Mountain Lakes. Mr. Gomme. After you come down Powerville Road and you bump into Morris Avenue and you make a left turn, the second house on the left was Mr. Gomme’s. I had him for a while as a Sunday school teacher. That’s one thing I noticed when I went through the diaries. I went to Sunday school right up until the time I got in the Service. He worked in the Bank of Montreal in New York. He’s the one who got me a job there. Twelve dollars and fifty cents a week.
JG:	A week?
FW:	A week. Course there wasn’t any way for me to go to college.
JG:	You took the train in? I didn’t ask before, your Dad must have taken the train in.
FW:	We took the train ride in for a while together.
JG:	What was his job?
FW:	The last position that Dad had, he collected banker’s names all over the United States -- mailing lists.
JG:	But your first job out of high school, what did you do?
FW:	I was a runner on Wall Street, all of downtown. That’s what I did, from there I was promoted to the cable room and then I got the big promotion to the cashbook upstairs. It was a Canadian bank I worked for Canadian Bank of Montreal, 64 Wall Street. I worked there until I came up for conscription. You had to put a year in the service back in those days.
JG:	We want to get to your military career, so continue.
FW:	From the bugle I went to a trumpet. I could never afford lessons so I tried to teach myself and I saw in my diary an interesting thing. I don’t even remember the guy, but I paid some guy a dollar to give me a trumpet lesson. I’m so glad I kept that diary. But anyway, where was I?
JG:	We were asking about how your military career started.
FW:	You got a number to sign up and you had to wait for your number to be called. I met him, Jim Costley was his name. He lived in Mountain Lakes. We tried to form a little orchestra. He lived in one of those great big houses on Morris Avenue. Big third floor. We could get up there and his parents didn’t mind if we blasted our heads off. He was joining the 102nd Cavalry of the Essex Troop in Newark. Instead of waiting to be called up, he volunteered. So he finally talked me into it, which I’m glad he did.
JG:	What year was this?
FW:	1940. So I joined the 102nd Essex Troop in Newark, New Jersey in October. And there were a couple other fellows from Mountain Lakes who went out the same time I did. I know the Edris brothers, Bob and Pete, they lived on the Point. I remember halfway through the year, Bob had to get out. His Dad committed suicide and so he had to come back to Mountain Lakes to run his Dad’s business. Bob is dead. Pete Edris is still alive. He’s in North Carolina.
JG:	So you signed up and joined the Essex Troop.
FW:	The horse cavalry, yes, sir.
JG:	And you’d ridden a horse before?
FW:	No. The first time I rode one was in front of an old captain of the cavalry. We were having equestrian lessons, and I can still remember I was riding Gossip, was the horse’s name. I got too close to the horse in front of me and the horse in front of me broke wind and my horse went up like that and I went end over teakettle. I got up. I was so embarrassed. I walked back and started petting my horse on the neck and the captain chewed me out like I’ve been chewed out before for being nice to the horse -- “Let the horse know he did something wrong.”
JG:	So you started on horseback, but you ended up in airplanes. Tell us how that came about.
FW:	That came about after Pearl Harbor. I was inducted in January, the 3rd or 4th of 1942. I had finished with my one-year’s service to the country by then, but after Pearl Harbor everyone was in for the duration. Right after that, they decided it was time for the Cavalry to retire. Thank god. The 102nd was going to be mechanized, into light tanks and everything was going to be ground. I’d seen the movie All Quiet on the Western Front, and I saw the horrors of fighting in the infantry. I didn’t want that. I had a phobia, I guess you’d call it, about fighting on the ground. So I looked into the Air Force. In those days, if you had two years of college you were eligible to join the aviation cadets, it was called at that time. I didn’t have that. But when I was at Fort Jackson they told me at the recruiting station that I could take a written exam, a two or three-hour exam and also a physical exam, which was about as rigid as they could give you. If I passed both, I could be an aviation cadet. I took both exams and I passed them. I really decided I had been misguided not to study. I learned how to study then. I made it through, but it was awful hard work. I always tell kids: Study. Study. No matter what you do, you never have it so good as when you’re in school.
JG:	You had a very distinguished military career.
FW:	Me, and millions of others.
JG:	We’ll interview those millions of others at another time, but we’ve got you here now, so tell us what you did to earn the medal you received. It took a while to get that medal, I understand, so we’ll have to talk about that too.
FW:	I got two medals. The one that took me the longest to get is this one right here.
JG:	On the wall, right above the chair you’re sitting in.
TD:	The Legion of Merit.
FW:	I’m still very proud of that, for myself and my family. Near the end of my combat days in World War II... I just read that very few people flew 25 missions. They just didn’t make it. Anyway, they cross-trained me in radar, so I was a bombardier. That’s what I wanted to be and that’s what I trained for and what I was.
JG:	Where did you fly your missions?
FW:	It was B-17s over Europe, from France all the way into Germany. I went on the Ragensburg mission, flew over the Alps, down past Sardinia and the Mediterranean. The Ragensburg mission, big deal for aircraft parts for the Luftwaffe. That was August of 1943.
JG:	Were there close calls among those 25 flights?
FW:	I’ll tell you, from the first mission on, I was a very prayerful man. I never took off without praying. That’s God’s truth. I still say my prayers.
JG:	Tell us what the medal is for.
FW:	When we were flying over Europe, I would say about 7 days out of 10 you were flying over 10/10ths cloud cover. You couldn’t see the ground.
JG:	Ten/tenths, in other words, solid clouds.
FW:	Yeah, you can’t see through. Behind the B-17’s navigator and pilots was a Mickey radar operator. When we went on a mission when there was a good chance the sky was going to be covered with clouds we’d have a mickey operator with us and the mickey operator could see through the clouds with the radar, of course. It struck me, somewhere along the line, that that guy was trying the same thing with radar that I was with the bombsight. So my idea was to coordinate the two. When you started your bomb run, have everything set up in the bombsight same as the radar man did in the back, cause he did the same thing. What your bombsight did, it determined the dropping angle -- you’re flying at a certain height and a certain air speed and a certain course. Where is that point in space that is the dropping angle for whatever bomb -- 1,000 pounder, 500 pounder. It takes a parabolic curve and down into the target. That’s what he was trying to do and that’s what I was trying to do, and many times when you were on your bomb run you’d get breaks in the clouds and there was always the possibility that if you were still on your bombsight and running along the course to the target that you might be able to pick it visually and if you could pick it up visually, hell, you could bomb it visually. Radar in those days was in its infancy. All you had was a little PPI scope in front of you. You had a little blip over here and you might be able to identify that blip...
JG:	So do I have this right? If the flight took off and you expected thick cloud cover, then there would be a radar-driven dropping of the bombs.
FW:	They dropped a flare over the dropping angle.
JG:	And as the bombardier, you’re still pushing the button to make that bomb fall?
FW:	Yes, over the flare.
JG:	Your suggestion was: wait a minute, if all of a sudden its clear, shift the responsibility back to me because I’ll do a better job of it visually than working with this still primitive image on the screen.
FW:	Because radar was a lot of interpolation.
JG:	And nobody thought of this before you came up with the idea?
FW:	I wouldn’t say that, but if they did, they didn’t speak up. The funny thing about it was, they put me up for the medal while I was still over there, and I never heard a word about it. Never. One time my wife and I -- we’ve been several times to England, back to the base, and while I was over there I came across a book that was written by, I forget his name, but in there he had a full description of my idea. I wrote him a letter. I still have the letter upstairs.
JG:	Decades went by and nothing came of the award.
FW:	In fact, when I was recalled for the Korean War, one of the first people I met in Japan asked: “Wiz. Did you ever get your medal?”
JG:	Wiz. Was that your nickname in the service? Nickname in Mountain Lakes? Nickname all the way through life?
FW:	All the way through, yes. But Harry Dennis Jr., we call one another George. We drive people crazy, because he’s George and I’m George. I read in the book and I wrote to him. Anyway, this fellow who wrote the book said he could only vaguely remember where he got all the information, but said the way you write the letter, it must have been from you. Anyway, I never did anything, even then, but it kept growing on me. Did you do it, or didn’t you do it?
JG:	You started to wonder if the idea was yours?
FW:	Because there was this colonel. He was in charge of bombing when I was flying. They were saying it was possible he’d been thinking about it. Anyway, to make a long story short, our operations officer is the one who put my request in through the chain of command. He signed the paper. He went with me on it, put papers in, I think it took six or seven months, but I don’t really know, to check through all the records and thank heavens they did--
TD:	They found the original document?
FW:	I don’t know what they found but anyway the research was made and finally I got a call from Frelinghuysen’s office in Morristown in 2004.
JG:	So well into the new millennium. Well more than half a century had gone by before you got the award. It still meant a lot to you, though?
FW:	Boy, you could have caught me six feet in the air. I was very proud of that. Just as I was proud of this other one: The French Legion of Honor.
JG:	Why did you get that medal?
FW:	I was made an honorary member of the 117th Cavalry, which is in Westfield. When I was at one of their meetings, Phil Notestine, who lived in Mountain Lakes-- if it wasn’t for Phil, because I had stopped driving for a number of years now, at my age I feel I should-- so I didn’t have any way to get anywhere and Phil heard of me, I don’t know where, and took me out for lunch one day at The Club and we became good friends and he introduced me into the 117th Cavalry and there was a French lieutenant that happened to be at one of their meetings and we were talking about the war. He asked, would you mind showing me some of your credentials. Patrick du Tertre is his name. I believe he lives in Mountain Lakes now, too.
TD:	Oh, du Tertre, sure. His daughter graduated a year ago from the high school.
FW:	He’s a real nice fellow. Apparently I must have flown seven or eight combat missions over France and they told me I would get this.
JG:	When was that awarded?
TD:	It says 2009.
FW:	I was called by the French Consulate and I had to go into New York. First time I’d been into New York since I retired on December 31, 1980. I worked at the World Trade Center.
JG:	When you came back from the war you went back to the bank?
FW:	Very soon, but then I found that all the money I saved was going, going. Banks, if you’re good worker, they’re fine, but they don’t pay.
JG:	How did you finish out your working career then?
FW:	I joined the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line, a freight line in Europe. That line was bought out by another Dutch line and now I get my pension from Royal Netherlands, which is about the largest steamship line in Europe.
JG:	So you went to work in the shipping industry after World War II, commuting into New York, and you lived here in Boonton?
FW:	Yes, I lived here since 1945.
TD:	In this house, Frank?
FW:	In this house, yes.
JG:	Did you consider moving to Mountain Lakes?
FW:	I would have loved to have been able to afford to move to Mountain Lakes, but one year of the taxes on a Laker and I’d be back where my Dad was. I couldn’t afford Mountain Lakes. We had children. Here again, I wasn’t going to bite off more than I could chew.
TD:	Did you have good friendships that you had forged in Mountain Lakes during your youth that you kept going all your life?
FW:	One of the many things I loved about the service, you know you have friends, but when you make a real service friend, you have somebody for life. I never wanted to lose a friend and that’s how Harry Dennis Jr. and I have stayed in touch since the thirties. He lives in Florida. I spoke with him just last week and told him you gentlemen were coming over and can’t think of any better way to talk about what we did and what we didn’t do as youngsters growing up in Mountain Lakes –the companionship that he and I had. We’ve gotten together in London I don’t know how many times. When he was still flying he came up to my base and I went down to his base. First time I went to his base I said I’d never come again because the Germans bombed the base the night I got there.
JG:	Can you think of a special time of the year being a boy in Mountain Lakes? Fourth of July? You didn’t swim, but maybe you skated on the lakes? What were some of your fondest memories?
FW:	Skating from one side of the big lake to the other. That was quite a task, because I didn’t have very strong ankles. There were always good times in Mountain Lakes. We did things so differently than the youth of today does. The youth of today as far as I’m concerned, the best thing that could happen to them would be to have one year, call it prep school, between high school and college, because there they would learn discipline.
JG:	But in your time?
FW:	My Dad was a disciplinarian. I toed the line to my father and I never regretted it.
JG:	What were some of your other fond memories? Christmastime perhaps?
FW:	Well, Halloween. The things that we did, they don’t do today. They used to open up the gym in the public school and they had big basins down there with apples. You could bob for apples and costumes. You’d make your own costume. I remember Bill Thompson. He was killed at Pearl Harbor on the USS Oklahoma. He was a classmate of mine. A couple of times he and I played our trumpets at the school right off the stairway closest to the Boulevard at Christmas, while everyone came out and sang carols. I loved Scouts. We said that before. Sometimes in Scouts we’d have capture the flag. Do the kids today know it?
TD:	Oh, they still play that.
FW:	Capture the flag every year. We had that. I’m glad they still do it, because it’s a lot of fun. And we had yearly games of Hare and Hound, with Mr. Springer leading.
TD:	We had a block party last week on our street, Wilcox, and the kids all played it. Let me ask you, do I recall you having stories about the Market building. Was there a candy store there you used to go to?
FW:	Rhodes was the name of the store that burned down and that is where the kids used to meet after school. We’d sit in there and talk. Doctor Booze had the first drug store. He was the druggist. Where the hair salon is now. He was a very portly gentleman and when we were kids we used to go in there and buy Mary Janes-- if this was his window, Mary Janes were way down here. They were a penny apiece. We’d buy them just to see old Doc Booze-- he had a big belly on him-- bend down there to get them.
TD:	It was worth a penny just to watch him? Was Mr. Yaccarino, the father, the first owner of the Market, was he still active?
FW:	It was Frank Yaccarino, I believe.
JG:	Was there anything about Mountain Lakes that you can think back to growing up as a boy in the town that made it special? That was very distinctive?
FW:	What made it distinctive to me, with Mountain Lakes, I knew a lot of people in Boonton -- in the early days they called us ten-cent millionaires.
JG:	Doesn’t sound necessarily positive. What do you think that implies?
FW:	(puts his finger on his nose)
JG:	Snobbishness?
FW:	I’m surely not going to mention names of people, but I know some of the kids here, if a Mountain Lakes fellow would come down and wink at their sister or something he’d pick a fight with him. They didn’t like Mountain Lakers back then.
TD:	Was there a big rivalry between Mountain Lakes and Boonton?
FW:	Sportwise, yes there was. It was written up in the papers. They said that Boonton had never beaten Mountain Lakes in football. That got my hair up because my junior year and my senior year I was on the second team, played left guard for Boonton. The powers that be, the coaches or whatever, one time managed to make a game between Boonton’s second team and Mountain Lakes’ first team. I loved that because I knew everybody on the first team. What the heck, I grew up with them. We beat them. Boonton did beat Mountain Lakes in football. Some things you don’t forget.

End of Interview

Oral Histories and Recollections