Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01 Interview # 01: May 29, 2013 Interviewer: Mark Depue
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Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01 Interview # 01: May 29, 2013 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 Wednesday, May 19, 2013. My name is Mark DePue, the Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago, Illinois, a gorgeous facility, and I have the privilege of sitting across the table with General John Borling. Borling: You’re too generous. DePue: Good afternoon, General. Borling: Hi, Mark, how you are? DePue: Good. I’ve been looking forward to doing this one for quite a while. Borling: I appreciate your flexibility. DePue: I know you have a fascinating story, and as I just mentioned to you, I’d like to get quite a bit of background information to figure out who you were before you ended up in the Vietnam War and—very unfortunate for you, I’m sure— spent six and a half years in North Vietnam. Borling: Came out the better for it actually. DePue: Well, we’re going to hear your rationale for saying that, but let’s start with when and where you were born. John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01 Borling: Chicago, Illinois, March 24, 1940, Lying-In Hospital [this was known as the maternity hospital]. It was the first time that Easter had been on March 24 for hundreds of years, and it won’t be there again. My mother, Vivian Strietelmeier Borling, called me her Easter Lily. I never knew what the hell she was talking about until maybe four or five years ago, I happened to get curious and look that up, on the web, and found that out. So I guess if there’s anything messianic about my comments today, you can blame it on my mother. DePue: Strietermeier? Borling: Strietelmeier, German, Deutsche. DePue: Strietelmeier. Borling: Strietelmeier, Bouer [a farmer] from Bavaria. DePue: Borling doesn’t sound very German. Borling: Borling was really Beurling. It’s anglicized to Borling. My mother was Irish and German; my father was Swedish. I like to say we were born Pogrensa in the old days, in Sweden and Norway—which is right on the border—but I’m not sure it’s true. I lived in Norway for so long, I had to pass as Norwegian, and I love the Norwegians. So there’s typical antipathy between the two, which is more figment than fact, the stuff of jokes and the stuff of good natured competition. But some of it lingers from the World War II period. Anyway, I’m Swedish, Irish and German. My wife is Swedish, Welsh, all that other stuff, but we’re Americans, quintessential Americans. I hate hyphenated Americans. DePue: Born in 1940. Was your father in the military by chance? Borling: Born in 1905, he was a cavalry officer, reserve. He got called up in ’43 or ’44, went back up to [Fort] Sheridan. He had a wife and two kids by this time, so that would have made him forty-plus. They’re on their horses, drilling around on the Fort Sheridan grounds, and the colonel comes out—this is when colonels had power—and said, “What are you guys doing?” They said, “Well, we’ve been called up, and we’re drilling our unit here,” horse cavalry, and he said, “Go home,” so they went home. DePue: In 1943. So he never made it to the war itself then. Borling: He never did, but again, if you look at it, he was thirty-eight, almost forty years old, with a wife and two kids. I think that was ample reason to excuse him, but Lieutenant Borling was very proud of his cavalry service, starting at the University of Illinois way back when. DePue: Did you grow up in Chicago? 2 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01 Borling: The south side of Chicago, in the family home at 77th and Drexel, 7700 Drexel, built by my grandfather/great-grandfather, and had a two-floor home, another Borling. He had three brothers. His older brother lived upstairs with a wife and two kids, two girls. We lived downstairs; I have a sister. When my dad was 100, we had occasion to take him back through the house. I stopped by, and the woman who had bought the house from my dad was still there. I’d never met her, but she knew about me. We walked Dad through the house. I got to take some measurements of the house. I always thought it was a spacious place, and it turned out it was about 650 square feet, one little tiny bathroom, a family of four, a coal burning boiler in the basement, and it was home. We thought it was great. My room was five-by- seven. DePue: Well, that’s going to be vaguely familiar to you. Borling: I would later live in a five-by-seven room again, for a whole bunch of years. I had windows though, in my room in Chicago. DePue: Chicago was then, and I think it still is today, a city of neighborhoods. What was your neighborhood like? Borling: Mixed, and it was just starting to affect the sociological changes as we got into high school, with an influx of black students. But principally, it was…the German phrase is gemischte; it was all mixed up. There were heavy Italian, lots of Jewish people, but not as many on the South Shore, where my wife grew up. I met her in high school. It was a normal Chicago middleclass neighborhood, with focus on the park. DePue: As you were growing up, on the grammar school— Borling: My mother was very active in the PTA. My dad was an accountant for a while and then became a salesman for a folding carton company, proud of his Swedish heritage. He later joined, then was president, of the Southside Swedish Club, again, all this on a modest middle class salary. Mom was stay- at-home. We lived right across the street from the high school, a block from the grammar school. It was the old thing, come back when the streetlights come on, kind of thing. DePue: Growing up, in other words. Borling: Growing up, yeah, and we roamed around the alleys and the byways and the highways and probably never ventured more than three or four blocks from the stoop, until we obviously got older and more mobile, intractable in our ways, as young men tend to be. Always an emphasis on the church, which was two blocks away, Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church. The family focus was strong, and the impetus to do well in school was constant. I don’t ever recall it being onerous, but constant. 3 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01 The ability to travel. When I was ten, we took the ’47 DeSoto, the car we got after the war, took it west, down [U.S. Route] 66 and out to California for a convention, and then back across the great western states. I remember, I wanted to see Wyoming, until we got there, and there wasn’t anything to see. We didn’t go to Yellowstone. Colorado, across the Nebraskas and stuff. It was a very interesting trip. A few years later, we went to Florida. I also went to Washington and New York, the Gettysburg area, not New York, Pennsylvania. This was the stuff of, I thought, considerable horizon- stretching for my sister and me. We also had a small summer home cottage—still a small summer home cottage—on a lake that my grandfather had bought in 1927. A fifty-foot frontage on this small lake, which we still have. In fact, I bought everybody out. That’s a mooring point for us, and I’ll be going there for the first time this year, on Saturday, on the first of June. I’m looking forward to that. Actually, I was up in the winter to get some work done. DePue: Was the small summer home smaller than your house? Borling: It’s bigger. (DePue laughs) It’s bigger! It’s 1,000 square feet, three bedrooms. DePue: You mentioned a park that you grew up next to. What was the park? Borling: Grand Crossing Park. It was a standard thing, about a block wide and two blocks long. It had a gym and a swimming pool. The park was a central focus for us when we were growing up. I was a member of the Park Boys in grammar school. In fact, we had a football team that was so good, we didn’t lose a game our eighth grade year.