Transcript of an oral interview with John Karl Rankin. Rankin begins by talking about living on a farm in the Oklahoma panhandle during the Dust Bowl days. He describes a massive dust storm striking the farm on his fourteenth birthday. He also shares anecdotes about cowboying on his uncle's ranch in Colorado as a teenager. In August, 1942, Rankin joined the Marine Corps, where he went to radio school and then radar school. he was attached to the First Marine Air Warning Squadron. Once he shipped overseas, Rankin's unit set up their radar station in the Marshall Islands. Rankin describes the radar station being attacked one night by a Japanese bomber. Rankin also discusses going ashore on D-day at Okinawa to set up another radar station. Later in April, 1945, Rankin's unit was sent to Ie Shima where he witnessed a massive air raid of Japanese kamikazes on the American fleet at Okinawa. After the Japanese surrender, Rankin describes being caught in a typhoon that went through Okinawa, and again in another one on the way back to the US. When Rankin was discharged, he enrolled in the UNiversity of Oklahoma at Norman and became a Methodist minister.

Transcript of an oral interview with Allan D. Morrison. In 1942, Morrison finished high school in Bozeman, Montana before enrolling in the Civilian Pilot Training program. His eyesight disqualified him as a pilot, so the Army Air Corps sent him to McDill Field in Florida for advanced communications training in early 1943. He had never even had basic training and finally got shuffled to Chicago for radio school. Morrison developed an illness that prevented him from graduating and moving on, so he stayed in Chicago for a while before moving on to Sioux Falls, South Dakota where he finally graduated as a radio mechanic. His first assignment took him to Annette Island in southeastern Alaska. While there, he operated an SCS system, which allowed aircraft with the right equipment to make instrument landings on the field at Annette Island (in case of fog, etc.).

Concert presented at the UNT College of Music Voertman Hall.