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RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY NEW BRUNSWICK AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT F. MOSS FOR THE RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES OF WORLD WAR II INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY G. KURT PIEHLER AND BRYAN HOLZMACHER METUCHEN, NEW JERSEY OCTOBER 13, 1994 TRANSCRIPT BY BRYAN HOLZMACHER AND G. KURT PIEHLER Kurt Piehler: This begins an interview with Robert F. Moss on October 13, 1994 in Metuchen, New Jersey with Kurt Piehler and... Bryan Holzmacher: Bryan Holzmacher. KP: I guess I'd like to begin by talking a little bit about your parents. You grew up in Perth Amboy? Robert F. Moss: [I was] born and raised in Perth Amboy. KP: And your father worked for Western Union, and your mother... RM: Yes. They were originally Morse operators. The dot and the dash. ...This is .... early in the century. ...My mother and father met in Thousand Islands, New York when my father was a manager of the Western Union. [He was] a young manager of the Western Union Summer Office in Ogdensburg, NY and my mother was up temporarily at the Thousand Islands resort for a summer job. ...They were talking on the dot and dash telegraph machine and started up a romance and finally decided to meet. Eventually they got married and they needed a better job. They got transferred to an industrial city, Perth Amboy. My father was the manager and my mother was the clerk from time to time, the assistant. KP: Did you ever think that you might work for Western Union? RM: Never. Western Union later became a typewriter communication ... where you type on a tape that goes through the machine and the tape goes through the machine in California or New York or Florida. And those tapes are pasted on a letterhead of Western Union and delivered by a Western Union messenger. So the Morse Code became obsolete. KP: So your parents saw the transition .... RM: Absolutely. They were trained in it and lost it, and stayed with the company in a different mode. KP: You wrote in Tom Kindre's book that he was trying to compile ... that it was very important to your mother to stay in touch with people and friends. That you spent a lot of time visiting, Brooklyn for example. RM: Yes, that was one of the lessons she taught me. She was an only child. She had high school friends. I'm not sure she finished high school, but she had friends in school and she kept up with those friends. They turned out to be my aunts. And I have done the same thing with my old friends. I don't let them slip away. I send them cards when I travel and we get together once in a while. So I have a lot of social friends. KP: You mentioned that you stayed in touch with people from high school and of course from college, I know. 2 RM: Yes, I've taken them sailing and taken them to different ball games and invited them to parties from time to time. We're slowing down in our older age. BH: Is it your own boat? RM: Yes, I was out sailing yesterday. BH: You were sailing yesterday? RM: Because I have a prospect to buy it. I've had the boat for twenty-three years and I could sail it a few more years, but I think it's probably a good idea to bring it to an end before some accident happens or something happens like that. I've had all the fun and success and happiness that I could possibly obtain from anything. KP: You grew up in Perth Amboy. What kind of community was it? What was it like for you when you were growing up? RM: Well, it had a wonderful school system. ...It had a great reputation in those days and of course it's on the waterfront. I've always lived near the waterfront. So I got started in swimming and sailing at an early age. It was a mixed community. A lot of Ukrainian and Hungarian and Slavic people lived in the North end of town. In the south end of town, there were Jewish families and Catholics and Protestants, mostly from Western Europe. So every group was represented in a town of about 40,000. KP: Was your father a volunteer fireman? RM: No, no. KP: [I ask this] because I remember reading in the WPA guide that there was quite a struggle in Perth Amboy over the volunteer firemen. RM: Well, there was always something going on in those departments. My father was a member of the YMCA and he played volleyball on a regular day with a regular group every week. And my mother said, "Don't ever interfere with his volleyball." (laughter) I don't think that we ever did. KP: When did you know that you wanted to go to college? What were your parents' thoughts about college? RM: Well, my sister is five years older and this was the middle of the Depression. She graduated in [19]34, high school. I graduated in '38. The middle of the Depression. My folks fortunately had a job, but they were cut in pay and cut in hours. Some how they managed to put my sister through four years of NJC [New Jersey College for Women]. And when she graduated NJC, that was my first year to go to Rutgers. And my parents just made sure [they could afford it]. It didn't cost very much in those days. 3 KP: They wanted you to go to college? RM: The family always planned [for] college. There's no question about that. KP: [Was this] because your father only had some high school? RM: Yes, that's right. Neither one of them, I think, were high school graduates. KP: But they still thought that it was very important to... RM: Yes. My mother wanted me to be a dentist. She had it all picked out. I even took pre-med in college for two years. I changed because I didn't think I was cut out to be a dentist or a doctor. I wound up a lawyer. BH: You took pre-med for two years because of your parents' wishes? RM: Exactly. BH: Okay, it wasn't your own decision? RM: No, I didn't really know what I wanted. So [in order] to make the opportunity possible, I took pre-med. KP: Did you think at the time, that you wanted to be a lawyer when you switched from pre-med to.... RM: No, absolutely not. In my fourth year of college, I was a commuter like my sister. After three years of college and spending every lunch hour in the student union building, playing ping pong, I developed a friendship with Tom Kindre and Dr. Alvin Mancusi-Ungaro. And towards the end of our junior year, we were all very active. We discussed the possibility of getting together and renting an apartment in New Brunswick. We enlisted another fellow Victor Shedko, who was only a sophomore. The four of us rented an apartment on Paterson Street, across from the court house. Well, I spent a whole year there, across from the court house and never walked into the court house once. BH: So it was an after thought then, being a lawyer after graduation? RM: Well, the rest of the story is that Al thought he might be a lawyer because his father was a lawyer. When he decided to be a doctor, I said, ... he was going to be my lawyer and I was going to be a promoter. I was going to promote things like golf driving ranges with college students working in [them]. I had a few other ideas. Anyway, when he decided to become a doctor ... I didn't quite know what to do. When the GI Bill of Rights was announced, when I was in the middle of the war, I decided to go to law school later and to become my own lawyer. And that's what I did. I never thought of it until literally the end of the war to be honest with you. Actually, 4 I had a job with Young and Rubicam in New York City when I graduated college. [I worked] for about two months and then I was called into the Army. I was an advertising apprentice. KP: Yes, yes, I know. RM: They are well known. A good advertising agency. KP: Why did you come to Rutgers? Had you thought of going to other schools? RM: Well, actually for undergraduate college, it was the only opportunity. The only opportunity to commute to college. BH: Did you have to work through school? RM: I did work summers. One summer I worked at the Perth Amboy Dry Dock Company. That's a company that lifts boats up out of the water and paints them and chips off the old paint. I was in the paint shop one summer. Another summer, I worked for Shell Oil Company in their storage tank project in Seawaren and I was the assistant to the foreman, drove the truck, and was the gofer. They weren't big jobs, but they were two full-time summer jobs. During my college years, especially my senior year, I sold candy and worked in a pocketbook factory. I did eventually get a state scholarship my last year based on my extra curricular activities probably. And so we managed to put it all together and I had the support of the family all the way through.

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