Tuesday morning early, about 2 a.m., I was called to the Turkey Plant for guard duty because the other guard was sick and had to go home. I got off duty at 6:00 a.m., came home, ate breakfast, and decided to get some sleep.

About 10:30 a.m. the doorbell rang and Dorothy said some strange man was at the door and that she was not going to answer. She thought he was a salesman. (we get our share of these.) The door bell rang several times, Still thinking it was a salesman, I decided the only way to get rid of him was to answer and tell him "No" no matter what he was selling. I wanted to get back in bed for more rest.

When I answered the door, the "stranger" wanted to know if John Essig lived here and I said "yes". He wanted to know if I was a gunner on a B-29 and again I said 'Yes." He said his name was Tom Smith. Still thinking he was a salesman, I just locked at him sort of stunned. Then all of a sudden it seemed like lightning struck me. I realized who he was. I yelled at him and demanded that he come in. I said the whole crew had been trying to get his address for "50 years." He said, "What is the matter?" I assured him that nothing was wrong; that we just wanted to correspond.

Before reminiscing about old times, I immediately took down his address and asked him to drop his address on a card to Bell, Jones, Callaghan, Shulman and Baldridge. I asked that he do this before he did anything else, He said he would.

I imagine we talked about half of the morning and half of the afternoon. We went over to Williams Store and had a small lunch. He left around 3:00 p.m heading West in his camper for the Mississippi River and St. Louis.

Smitty is single, never married, just retired, and said he had always wanted to do what he is now doing-just traveling around the USA. He had sold his home in Florida. He said he used to work for a brokerage firm in Providence, RI., a hotel, I think, and then returned to college. For several years he worked in hospitals in Florida as a medical technician, working with doctors in the operating room. He was telling of several different operations in which he would assist the doctors with different kinds of new instruments and new techniques. He said the changes were coming fast and furious and new and younger employees were coming in so he just decided to retire and. see the country.

Some of the things we talked about follows. I am just listing them in a rather Rambling fashion with the thought they might bring back memories. I am enclosing copies of notes that Tom Smith had in his notebook. Perhaps they will bring back memories also. They certainly did for me.

Here is an episode we discussed. It seems that we had reached the end of our training here in the states, were about ready for overseas, and were having fun in Kansas City. We were several stories up in one of the hotels. Drinking Southern Comfort "soda pop." Smitty crawled up on the window ledge and was going to jump out of the window. I asked one of the other crew members what the devil had gotten into him, and he said "Too much Southern Comfort- he is plastered." Smitty said he remembered calling Tom Bell an old "burr-head", something none of us would ever think of calling our pilot, an officer, and one who was a Senior Citizen to all of us start aleck gunners. But Smitty said Tom Bell just laughed it off. It was a wonder he did not fire us all. But I guess, back there and then, good help was hard to find. Besides T. Bell was not that kind of person.

Smitty was telling of the time, he was eating the concentrated chocolate bar in the tail section of the plane. I often thought he was hungry and ate it too fast. He said he was O.K. until he laid down the partially eaten bar and it started to move away from him. He said he picked up the bar and looked at it closer and it was full of maggots. This when he called T. Bell on the intercom and said he was feeling sick, T. Bell said we were over Japan and he would have to stay in the tail section. A few minutes later he called back to say he had 'tossed his cookies." T. Bell told him he would have to stay there and clean it up after we got back over the ocean.

Smitty was telling a story, and I remember it, when we were in training. One time Johnson was drunk and seemed to be as limp as an old dish-rag, Smitty got him back to the barracks, got him partially undressed, and tried to get him in his bunk. Here was Smitty trying with all his might to get Johnson, who was moving around in all sorts of positions and contortions, up in his bunk. The amusing part was that Johnson slept in the upper part of the double bunk. Finally, after several minutes went by, Smitty was successful, only to have Johnson roll over and out the other side, back down to the floor. Luckily, I don't think he was hurt. Unfortunately, I don't recall if any of us other crew members helped Smitty get Johnson into his bunk.