Interview with Ernest Thorp # VR2-A-L-2009-042.1 Interview # 1: December 17, 2009 Interviewer: Mark Depue
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Interview with Ernest Thorp # VR2-A-L-2009-042.1 Interview # 1: December 17, 2009 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Thursday, December 17, 2009. My name is Mark DePue. I’m the Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m going to be interviewing Ernest Thorp in what I think is going to be two or three sessions. Ernest is a veteran of World War II, a B-17 copilot, was downed and was captured, and so spent the last part of the war as a POW in a German POW camp. Good morning, Ernest. Thorp: Yes, sir. Good morning. DePue: Looking forward to this one, (Thorp laughs) because you have the ability to put together a good story, Not only that, but you wrote practically every day a diary, and I’m holding it in my hand. It’s titled, My Stretch in the Service, 1943–1945 . And there are some fascinating entries in here. We’ll talk about the process of writing the diary as we get to that point, but let’s start with when and where you were born. Thorp: Well, I was born February 3, 1921, in a hospital in Clinton, Illinois. DePue: And where did you grow up? Thorp: I grew up here on Route Three what they call Box 252, Clinton, Illinois, though I’m only two and a half miles from Wapella, Illinois. DePue: Okay. It’s pronounced Wapella (Wah-PEL-a). How big is Wapella? Ernest Thorp Interview # VR2-A-L-2009-042.1 Thorp: Oh, about five hundred people. DePue: Where did you grow up, then, on the farm? Thorp: I grew up on the farm. I went to eight years of Thorp Grade School. Then I went two and a half miles to Wapella High School, and that’s where I graduated in 1939. DePue: Okay. Well, we’re going to take some time here, because you’re one of those people I like to talk with about their experiences during the Depression and growing up on the farm in rural Illinois. Let’s start with a little bit about your parents and how—first of all, where are we sitting right now? Thorp: We’re sitting on a piece of property that my grandfather took charge of in 1881. DePue: Eighteen eighty-one. Is that when he immigrated here? Thorp: Well, he had loaned people the money that owned this farm, and they couldn’t pay, so he took over. Across the road is where I was raised as a boy. DePue: When did your ancestors get here, then? Thorp: Well, my great-grandfather Joseph came over in, let’s see, 1858—oh, 1851. Then he bought land in 1851 and moved here in 1856. Because when he first come from England, they worked at the textile shop in Fall River, Massachusetts, and they worked there five years getting enough money to pay and help farm when they come to Illinois. DePue: That’s an interesting time to come to the United States, since it’s on the eve of the Civil War. Did you have any relatives involved in the Civil War? Thorp: Well, my great-grandfather is listed as a deserter. The rumor has it in the family that he paid somebody to take his place when they drafted him in the Civil War. I did have a grandfather on my mother’s side who served in the Civil War, was wounded at Shiloh, and came back to DeWitt County to be state’s attorney and county superintendent of the schools and a lawyer—he was about a half a dozen things. They gave him credit for getting the headstones for about 150 veterans of the Civil War after the Civil War. So he was a community man, more so than my Grandfather Thorp. (laughs) DePue: Are we sitting in DeWitt County? Thorp: Yes, this is DeWitt County. DePue: Just on the drive here, I noticed that deep, rich loam soil. Thorp: You betcha—some of the best farm ground in the world. 2 Ernest Thorp Interview # VR2-A-L-2009-042.1 DePue: Absolutely. When your ancestors got here, was this good land to farm, or was it underwater to a certain extent? Thorp: It was land that too many people considered all it was good for was ducks and malaria fever because there were so many ponds, no drainage, and everything. So in other words, if you weren’t close to a creek to get your ground tiled to, all you had to suffer was ponds most of the time. DePue: So there was a certain amount of hard labor to get it to be farmable. Thorp: Exactly, exactly. When I was a boy, my dad had thirteen ponds that I could count just going to grade school. DePue: What’s happened to those ponds now? Thorp: They’re tiled out. DePue: They’re farm, then? Thorp: They’re farm. You bet, you bet. DePue: You were born in 1921. You were eight years old when the Depression began, so I would imagine you have a lot of memories about growing up in the Depression. Thorp: Yes, I do, and hearing other people talk, because I was one of those fortunate few that had a dad who was a good farmer, and also he was a good machine operator. He committed himself to buying new equipment right on the eve of the Depression—like 1929, 1930, and then having difficulty getting it paid for because so many of his customers—when corn and wheat and stuff like that was so cheap—couldn’t raise enough money to even pay him for his custom work. And I can remember them worrying about him owing money. But he said, it was his salvation—and this is interesting, he was a Republican—but he had a job sealing corn in the corn cribs for the farmers so they could get government money on this corn that they haven’t sold at the elevator. And he said he was so lucky to have that job, and here he was, I thought, a good farmer, and he had all this machinery, but the machinery wasn’t worth anything to anybody else. When he couldn’t get paid for the jobs that he was doing with that machinery, it kind of put him in a bind. But we never suffered. We always had a good garden, and of course we had—my dad didn’t—but my grandparents butchered hogs and stuff of that type, that we didn’t lack for meat. But my dad did get enough money that we could buy groceries and not be handicapped to the point that we were deprived of good food and proper clothes. In other words, our hired men and some of the neighbors weren’t that lucky, but we were. So I was one of those lucky individuals. 3 Ernest Thorp Interview # VR2-A-L-2009-042.1 DePue: I wonder if you can describe the farm for us—how many acres and what kind of farm it was. Thorp: My dad had about 320 acres of ground, which made him a big farmer back in the ’30s. Our crops were corn, soybeans, wheat, and we had some barley during the Depression and when the prohibition was over. The trouble with barley was that the chinch bugs liked the barley, too, and my dad ended up plowing 120 acres of barley up, just plowing it up, because the chinch bugs were eating it, and that was a total loss. DePue: What was the barley intended to be used for? Thorp: Beer. And my dad was not a drinker. (laughter) Alcohol was very strictly forbidden in our family, and I was able to keep that habit of not using it. But so many people had hogs and chickens and cows and all that. And this is another strange thing as far as I was personally concerned—we didn’t have a cow. My dad didn’t like livestock; he got out of it as soon as he could—and I had to go to the neighbors to buy milk, you know, a tin bucket. DePue: Did you have chickens on the farm? Thorp: Yeah, we had chickens. DePue: Hogs? Thorp: Well, no hogs. When I was six years old, we had a tornado that come through the farm and took down all our barns, all our hog houses, and everything that had to do with livestock. My dad sold what was left alive after the tornado and he used the lumber out of the barns that was destroyed to build a big machine shed and a shop so he could take care of his equipment, machinery.