Keith Tillotson
Kenneth and Ida (1939)
When Kenneth got out of the Navy, he went through Texas and I guess that's where he met up with Ida. They corresponded all the years he was in the Navy. He first met her in Iowa in 1934. We were workin' up in northern Iowa pickin' corn and stuff like that for this big farmer. I was 17 and he was 19 at that time. I remember some little kids, but I don't know whether all four of Ida's kids were born there or not.
But anyway, I think he met up with her in Texas and he went up to Iowa and sold the farm. Then he took Perry and Mom down to Texas. I guess they didn't stay very long – they didn't like it down there.
Kenneth got married to Ida, and he decided to come back in the Navy. So, he got out in '38, and he was back in the Navy in '39. He wasn't out of the Navy very long. When he came back, he got on a different ship.
See, when he first joined the Navy he went to what they call the Asiatic Fleet, you know, out around China. Spent a lot of time in Hong Kong – the Japanese were at war with China at that time, remember? 1937. Yeah, 'cause they were down at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and all the bodies were floatin' by the ship all the time – they had to poke 'em away, you know.
They got a few bullet holes in their ship, but they never got involved in the war other than that, I guess. Outside of – you probably heard of the Panay, a little gunboat that the Japanese attacked on the Yangtze River. But other than that, we weren't in the war with them.
Of course, Hong Kong belonged to the British all those years – what, a 99 year lease, I guess, on it. They visited all those countries like Vietnam, Singapore, down in all those places. When I got in the Navy, he came back to the states. His time was up over there, and he got aboard my ship. So we served together for about a year or so, on the same ship.
At that time, he took correspondence lessons on engineering – diesel engines and stuff like that – and he got in the machine shop. There was two shops, you know, and they each had a lathe and he did that kind of work. But he was still a fireman like before, and we would sometimes be relieving each other on watch.
We didn't run around together too much. He wasn't too much on nightclubbing, or anything like that.