Keith Tillotson
The Yellow Chevy (1939)
When Kenneth got married, we bought this car – 1939 Chevy. I think it was around the fall, and the 40's were out. But they still had this '39 on the floor. Yellow four-door car, and it stood out like a sore thumb, goin'down the road – nice bright yellow car. Most cars were black or something like that in those days.
They wanted 1150 dollars for it – that's full price. But it was gonna' be about a thousand dollars what they were gonna' sell it for. We don't have but 150 dollars, so the guy says, "We'll charge you full price for it, and that's your down payment – 150 dollars." Drove it off without a dime in it. Didn't have any money in the car at all, just payments about 30 dollars a month for how long, I don't know. It seemed that I had to take care of all the payments on the car.
Then Kenneth decided to have his wife and kids come out to San Diego, and he rented an apartment. The Navy helped pay for part of that – they gave him a per diem for that. He brought Ida's sister Stella with 'em. She went with them wherever they went – she's with 'em.
The ships – both the ships, his ship and mine – went up to Vallejo, California to be overhauled. That's north of San Francisco, probably thirty or forty miles – along in there somewhere. I had one of my friends aboard ship drive the car up there, and brought Ida and the kids – Stella went back to Texas. He brought them up to Oakland.
So we had a car now to go from Oakland every day to the ship. 'Cause the ship was in dry-dock. I had to overhaul the boilers. Now, I'm second-class boilermaker, so it's my job to put in new tubes, new brick lining the fireboxes.
I remember that I wouldn't get this job done in time if I didn't get the bricks right away. So you make out a requisition for bricks – how many you need – but the squadron commander was in Hawaii. So you had to send out to him to get the OK for the bricks and the materials – tubes and all that stuff. I went over to the warehouse where they had all this stuff there, and talked the guy into givin' me the bricks before I got the requisition signed so I could get goin' on this job. So, I got the job done.
We finished the ship, and the engineering officer raised my rate to first-class boilermaker. I was the only boilermaker aboard, so he said, "You might as well be first class. You did the job." I didn't even take any examination. He just gave me the rate.