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Larry Bowers
October 1, 1999
Savannah reunion
Aaron Elson: Larry Bowers?
Larry Bowers: B-O-W-E-R-S.
Aaron Elson: And you were on . . .
Larry Bowers: Miner’s crew.
Aaron Elson: From training all the way through?
Larry Bowers: Well, yeah, from Casper, Wyoming, where we formed as a crew and trained together, then flew overseas on a new B-24. We took the northern route, that was a dangerous route back in those days.
Aaron Elson: It was?
Larry Bowers: Oh yes. You had to be out in the ocean so long. You didn’t have anything to guide you except your navigator. If he didn’t do a good job then you were lost out there somewhere.
Aaron Elson: And was Frank your navigator?
Larry Bowers: Frank Bertram, yes.
Aaron Elson: Yeah, I think he talked about that a little.
Larry Bowers: It’s a scary thing. Most of them went south, the southern route. The reason they did is because there were a lot of places land, and they didn’t have to stay out there that long. But they sent us the northern route, we made it.
Aaron Elson: Where were you from?
Larry Bowers: Where was I born?
Aaron Elson: Yes.
Larry Bowers: Moreland, Georgia.
Aaron Elson: Which part of Georgia is that in?
Larry Bowers: That’s south of Noonan. It’s a small town. And I lived on the farm. My father was a farmer and my mother was a schoolteacher. I had two brothers. One of them’s in the Georgia Hall of Fame, Harley Bowers. He’s a sportswriter, and he was the sports editor of the Macon Telegraph for years. And he’s one that still selects, helps select the high school award, and all that stuff. He’s retired now from doing the things. And my other brother was with the FBI for years.
Aaron Elson: And you were in the state police?
Larry Bowers: I was in the heating and air conditioning business. Heating and air conditioning manufacturers.
Aaron Elson: Now you being from Georgia, did you have ancestors in the Civil War?
Larry Bowers: Yes we did. We had two of them in the Civil War. Nothing about anybody that was in World War II. I really don’t know of anybody that was in World War II, for some reason. I think they’re lucky, though. Because they didn’t take as many people then as they did in, I mean in World War I. Yeah, I think there were quite a few that were in World War II. Of course, my brother was one, a lot of cousins.
Aaron Elson: And your brothers, what branch did they go into?
Larry Bowers: My older brother was in the 15th Air Force, and my younger brother was, he wasn’t in very long, he was young enough that he didn’t have to stay very long. He was, I don’t know what he was doing, not much of anything. You know how you do when you first go in.
Aaron Elson: What led you to go into the Air Corps as opposed to the infantry or the Navy?
Larry Bowers: Well, I volunteered for the Air Force to start with. I wanted to be a pilot. That was my biggest ambition. I passed the mental, and then when they got to the physical and they gave me an eye examination I was colorblind. So they wouldn’t take me. But then I went into the regular service, was drafted in the regular service, and they let me go into the Air Force. I asked for it and they gave it to me. And then at Keesler Field they sent me to airplane mechanic school in (unintelligible) and sent me to gunnery school, and then to form in the crew.
Aaron Elson: Now, what was your position on the crew?
Larry Bowers: I was engineer/gunner. In the waist.
Aaron Elson: So were you a lieutenant, or an enlisted man?
Larry Bowers: No, tech sergeant. We had an engineer in the front of the plane, Ault, he’s the one that handled all the engines and things like that, and I was in the back of the plane, didn’t do anything except just try to help if we needed help.
Aaron Elson: And what was your first mission like?
Larry Bowers: Uhhh, you know, really it’s exciting. The first, when you go in, when it’s exciting, you’re looking forward to it. The first mission we went to France and it wasn’t anything, it was just a regular old mission. And then when we started going on missions where a plane next to you blows up beside you and you realize what it’s like, then you begin to get a different feeling about it. And it’s a scary feeling. And we lost a lot of planes.
Aaron Elson: What was it like that time that Reg Miner had to crash land the plane in England? What happened then?
Larry Bowers: Oh, it was ... we had a lot of fun, really on it. We knew we were gonna come back. We thought we’d make it back all right, we didn’t think we were gonna have to crash land. And we knew we had to get rid of, we had two engines out, and we knew we had to get rid of stuff in the plane, so we got the bombardier on the bomb sight and he’d tell us when we went over a town and we could drop some and hit the town. We dropped the guns and ammunition and all this stuff on the towns. (Laughs). Then we got back to England, and Reg decided that we could make it back to the base. And we lost another engine, and that’s when we went into the crash landing. But we weren’t real sure that we were gonna crash land. I (unintelligible) when they crash land. We were in the back and all you had was a rope, about that wide, that goes across, and you put your back against it, your back toward the engine, and when you hit, I mean the plane always breaks apart and it just fills up with dust and dirt and everything, you don’t have an idea what’s going to happen. So you get up and get out as fast as you can, and then we started back to help other guys if they needed help but everybody was out by then, so we were all very fortunate. He did a good crash landing. He was a good pilot, he was a very good pilot.
Aaron Elson: And how about Weddell, with his having lost part of, a piece of his foot?
Larry Bowers: Well, he could still walk. He was able to get out, that’s the one we were going back to help, but they had already helped him out. He was up in the front of the plane, they’d already gotten him out and were bring him on across, so it wasn’t really that big a problem.
Aaron Elson: Now did that shake you up afterwards?
Larry Bowers: Well, we felt like it was both good and bad. It gave us a two-week rest and recuperation (laughs) so we got to go to London and spend two weeks down there, and that’s always good. We had a lot of fun in London. We went to see Weddle before we went down, and when we came back we stopped and saw him again, and then came back and started flying again. That’s what they do to you (laughs).
Aaron Elson: Now, the Kassel Mission, from start to finish. What happened?
Larry Bowers: Well, we were flying a regular mission, and we suddenly, there was a call from our navigator, he called Skip and he said we were off course. And Skip called, Reg called the commander and said we were off course, and he just said “Follow me.” So we didn’t have any choice, we followed him. And of course by that time we were completely off course. We dropped our bombs in an oat field, didn’t hit anything. And when we turned off the target we weren’t where we were supposed to be, and about that time the Germans came up and, we didn’t know it then but we learned it later that the Germans had made these FW, they’d put armor-plating on them so that our .50-calibers wouldn’t even penetrate them. And they came through us and I guess it was five or ten minutes and they’d shot us all down. It was really a terrible loss.
Aaron Elson: What was the scene on the plane when you were hit?
Larry Bowers: Uhhh, well we were basically shooting our guns. It wasn’t any different, really, we didn’t even know it until we got through shooting the guns, and then we realized that we were hit.
Aaron Elson: Now, when you were shooting, did you see any bullets bounce off the Fokke-Wulfs?
Larry Bowers: I couldn’t see it, really. We were aiming at them all around, and we didn’t see any but, uh, you know, you usually can hit ‘em if you ...
(Brief interruption)
Larry Bowers: Then we began to look around and saw that one engine was on fire, and we had a fire in the bomb bay which they never knew about in the front, they don’t even remember any fires at all. But we in the back of the plane saw fires, and we knew they were there. And we always carried a spare parachute, you know, we didn’t wear our chutes, the chest chutes. After we got through with the fighting and everything and looked around, one of the spare chutes’ line had been blown all over the place. So all of a sudden you say, well okay, where’s the spare? Look around and don’t see it. At that time the tail gunner came out, Lamberson(?) Came out, and he was bringing the spare chute with him, which was good.
Aaron Elson: So it was your regular chute had been blown up?
Larry Bowers: Had been blown up. It had been hit by a .20-caliber.
Aaron Elson: And there was one spare chute on the whole plane?
Larry Bowers: One in the front and one in the back.
Aaron Elson: But not everybody had a spare chute?
Larry Bowers: No.
Aaron Elson: So your chute had been blown up.
Larry Bowers: Yes it had.
Aaron Elson: Had it opened?
Larry Bowers: It was just blown up. And, because this is back when the radio operator was back in the tail. We were the lead crew, and we had a mickey operator so we had to move the radio operator back to the back, and he’s the one that took Weddle’s place, and he’s the one that was killed. He had his leg almost shot off. And we had to decide what to do with him, and we really didn’t have time to do much with him, so we put a chute on him and tied a rope to it and dropped him out and then pulled the chute for him, and the chute opened and he hit the ground all right, but Collar found him, George Collar used to be on our crew, he found him, and he was dead when he found him. Which was really tough, but ... I don’t know what else we could have done.
Aaron Elson: Was he conscious when you dropped him out?
Larry Bowers: No, he was unconcious.
Aaron Elson: But you actually got the chute to open?
Larry Bowers: Oh yes.
Aaron Elson: How did you do it?
Larry Bowers: We put a, tied a piece of rope to it, and then dropped him out through the escape hatch, and when he got down far enough to where you could, just pulled the rope, just stopped the rope from going out and it opened the chute. All that did is pull the handle.
Aaron Elson: And then did you drop the rope?
Larry Bowers: No, the handle comes off. When you pull the handle out, it goes off. Anyway, then we all bailed out, and it’s an interesting thing to bail out. I’ve always wanted to do it again, but my wife never would let me. But it’s so interesting because you can do just anything you want to, you can turn over and over and you go round and round and you stop yourself if you want to, and it’s really interesting. And you don’t really think about hitting the ground until you get close to the ground. When I started getting close to the ground there were some clouds below, and when I saw these clouds I said, “Gosh, suppose there’s a mountain sticking up in these clouds.” So I reached over and pulled my ripcord and I broke through the clouds, they were very thing and I broke through the clouds, and there was civilians down there. And we were always briefed not to let the civilians catch you, because they don’t like us very well and I don’t blame them, really. So I started trying to guide my chute, and there were two things wrong with, the Mae West, you know, and when you put the chute on, the harness on, you don’t have it as tight as you should. So it, when it’s not tight it really and truly hurts (laughs), so you hold it apart, the chute opens, and then I decided I’d better guide the chute, try to guide the chute (unintelligible) on one side so I could go in the woods over there. So I turned loose down here to do it and oh, it hurt, so I couldn’t do it, no, no way. But the wind took me into the woods. I went in the woods far enough where I could get away from the civilians over there, and I landed on this branch, a stream there, and I must have been free for about two and a half, three hours. And then I heard some people coming through the woods, so I crawled under a log. The German woods are wide open, you can see right through them. I crawled under this log, and they stopped up there on the road, I didn’t know there was a road up there, but they stopped on the road, and one of them came out to take a leak. When he came out he was standing there taking a leak and he saw me under the log. He pulled his pistol out and I came out and said, “Kamerad! Kamerad!” That’s all the German I knew. That’s when I was captured.
Aaron Elson: Was he a soldier?
Larry Bowers: He was a soldier, yes. They were all soldier. And they had picked up our tail gunner. When he hit the ground he broke his leg, so he was on the cart.
Aaron Elson: And who was your ...
Larry Bowers: Lamberson. He’s dead now. He’s the only one of the crew that I saw for, oh, gosh, until we went to dedicate the memorial. That was the first time I’d seen any of the crew.
Aaron Elson: What was the radio operator like, Gilfoil?
Larry Bowers: Well, we didn’t know him real well. He was a nice guy, but we didn’t know him, it wasn’t like he was part of the crew all the way through like Weddle is. He was just unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Aaron Elson: I think Frank had said that Gilfoil had gone down into the bomb bay to look for something or to check something?
Larry Bowers: No, he was still at the radio.
Aaron Elson: He was at the radio all along?
Larry Bowers: Yes he was. No, he didn’t, uh, until we took him off of there, he was still there. And that plane was full of holes, I mean there were bullets going through that thing like you wouldn’t believe. It’s a wonder that we ever survived. And Kitchens of course was in the other waist gun, he used to be the ball turret. They’d taken the ball turret out, and he and I were back to back.
Aaron Elson: And he lost part of his backside?
Larry Bowers: I don’t know.
Aaron Elson: That’s what Frank said.
Larry Bowers: I never knew that. But I got hit in the butt, you know, there’s so much going on, so much 20-millimeter flak and everything going on, you don’t really realize a lot of this until afterward. I didn’t realize it until I was running down this stream, when I got on the ground. I felt something running down my leg, as I say when I tell the story, I didn’t know what it was. (Laughs) Whether it was red or yellow. But it was red, it was blood. But it wasn’t serious, it was just enough to make me bleed. That’s the only damage I had.
Aaron Elson: It was shrapnel in your rear end?
Larry Bowers: Just a piece of, it wasn’t in there, it just hit it, it went through the clothes enough to make it bleed, that’s all it was.
Aaron Elson: And then which prison came did you go to?
Larry Bowers: Well, we were taken to Stalag Luft 4, and it took a while to go through, they took us in first and took us into a German headquarters, and you know, they have all these people working around there and they don’t have any officers hardly (unintelligible) and they made us strip. And it was so funny, I had in my flight suit, the legs had a pocket in it, and in there I had this picture of, what was her name, where she showed her breast and everything, I can’t remember her name now ... it was a picture that came out of the Stars & Stripes...
Aaron Elson: Like Jane Russell?
Larry Bowers: Jane Russell, that’s who it was. Jane Russell. I had that in there, and the other side was a whole bunch of stuff. And the Germans looked at that and they thought they had something. And I said, “No, no, other side.” (Laughs). But they put us in solitary for a couple of days ...
Larry Bowers: ... up to the camp, and this was a really interesting thing. One time we were strafed by P-51s, they came in and strafed the train. And I’ll tell you there are some people that are atheist, they just don’t think there’s any Lord at all, but when something like that happens you don’t find any atheists, everybody believes in, has to believe in something. And then one time the bridge was blown up in front of us and we had to stop and back up. It took us two weeks to go from where we were up to the camp. And we finally got there, and the camp wasn’t bad, I mean, it wasn’t the Hilton or anything but it wasn’t bad. It was better than a lot of places that you could go. It was crowded, very crowded, they had British and Americans there, and we got Red Cross parcels, it had been open long enough to get Red Cross parcels, and we could play cards, we had cards to play with and things. And on Christmas Day, they had told us that they were gonna leave us there and that the Russians would overrun us, because the Russians were pushing in toward the end of the time. All of a sudden they decided they were gonna move us out. So they took the sick, lame and lazy and put them on trucks or trains or something and moved them out, but the ones who could, were in good shape, they put us on a march, and they marched us through Germany for four months. We figure we went about 800 miles through Germany, that’s a long way. And that’s miserable weather up there, I mean this is cold. It’s like Minnesota weather. We had our flight suits. We had a jacket. And we had hobnail boots, because we didn’t have our own boots, we had just shoes that you couldn’t walk in, and that’s the way we walked. We had one blanket apiece that we brought from the camp, and at night when we got ready to sleep we’d sleep with three of under a blanket, we traveled in threes. Three of us under the blanket. The biggest problem is body lice, you get body lice in these barns that we slept in. And the guy in the middle gets warm, and the body lice eat on you when you get warm. But you can’t scratch them because there’s no room to scratch. It’s pretty tough (laughing), you don’t know whether you’re gonna be on the outside or you’re gonna be on the inside. But, uh, it’s, one of the other guys was also a farmer, he was raised on a farm, and we soon learned that the best way for us do was to be in the front of the line, when we got there we go to the back of the barn, and if we’d find anyplace with a loose board or anything we’d go out in the barnyard and find something to eat, eggs or something, anything we could find. And it’s, uh, that’s the way we survived, because they didn’t give us any food. They had one time that they gave us food. And it was so interesting, they brought in these wagonloads of food for us, it was Red Cross, and the British, their food sat there, and they had people that gave it out, each person. The Americans, it was survival of the fittest, everybody tore after it and fought and everything else to get it. It’s so funny how much difference there is in different people like that. But I was fight enough to get some, so ... But it’s, uh, we ate raw chickens, I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten a raw chicken or not.
Aaron Elson: Raw?
Larry Bowers: Yeah, raw chickens, yessir. If you can’t cook ‘em you’d eat ‘em anyway. We ate just anything we could find. Raw sugar beets, those don’t taste very good. Anything we could find that we could eat, we’d eat it. Oh, one time, we – they let us keep our watches, and we found out we could trade our watches for food, so we’d match to see who was going to trade the watch first, and I ended up having the last watch, we’d already traded the other two. So we’re trying to make a trade for mine when, the guys, it got to where the Germans were pretty bad off there toward the end and this was toward the end, and we couldn’t make a deal that was right, so they finally threw in a bottle of schnapps, the food and they threw in some schnapps too. So the next time we stopped, we stopped in a barn, it was a two-level barn so we got up in the top of the barn, took that bottle of schnapps and drank the whole damn thing, really got loaded. (Laughs). It was all right. Then we were marched into the 104th Field Artillery in, I forget the name of the town, it was, I could look it up, but, anyway, it was, that’s where they were stationed, they were sitting there waiting for the Germans because the Germans were on their way, and when we marched in they said, well gosh, we didn’t know about you coming or anything else, we don’t have anyplace for you to go except that school down there. Well, we had the guards’ pistols by then, we had one of them, the three of us had one pistol. And we decided the hell with it, we’re not gonna sleep down there. So we started in to town to find a house that we could take over and get to sleep. And one of the 104th Field Artillery guys stopped and picked us up, because we were filthy dirty, miserable, and asked us what we were doing. We told him. They took us back to their home, where they were living, and gave us a bath, gave us a haircut, gave us a shave. Gave us clean clothes. Fixed a big meal for us. Gave us a bed to sleep in. And the next morning came over to find out what time we were going to be carried behind the lines, and back, woke us up, fixed breakfast and carried us back there. And that was really appreciated. And it was interesting too that they took us back to an airfield, and this airfield was one that, because the Germans had left it, the Americans had taken it over, and there wasn’t anything to do around there for us, and we were there for about two weeks I guess. But they had all these cars around there, cars that had broken down or something. So we got out there and started fixing up all these cars. We’d get ‘em out and we’d steal gasoline out of the GI trucks, get ‘em out on the runways and just race the heck out of these cars. One morning we woke up and the CO had had ‘em all pulled in and locked up. No more cars. (Laughs). Then they brought us back to Lucky Strike, to get ready to come back to the States, and we wanted to go to Paris. That’s the one thing we wanted to do is go to Paris. So we begged and pleaded, we had a pass all the time to go to Le Havre, but they wouldn’t let us go to Paris. So finally they decided to give us a three-day pass to Paris, and we went into Paris, the first thing we did was went over to the finance office and collected some money that we had coming to us, and we enjoyed Paris. So, seven days later when we got back everybody was gone. (Laughs) They had all shipped out except us. Everything we had, all the souvenirs we had and everything, were gone too. But we did get back, and then they put us on the Black, which used to be a luxury liner, and they had turned it into transportation for the GIs, and it was so lucky, a guy that I knew in Tennessee was merchant marine on this, so he let the three of us stay up in the Merchant Marine quarters. We didn’t have to go down with the rest of the guys in the hold. So we had fun, but we had a storm coming back. It took us 15 days to come from Le Havre, France, to Norfolk.
Aaron Elson: How bad a storm was it?
Larry Bowers: It was bad. It was really interesting, it’s, you know, when you fly a plane you don’t get sick or anything, even from a storm. But this was, we’d go up on the front, and they had lines all over the thing, it was that bad, we’d go up on the front and this thing would go down and water’d wash over your head like this, I mean all over. And when it would go down that deep then the screws would come out of the back, you know, they’d be out of the water. This thing would just ride ‘em and everything. It was really a tough storm, one of the toughest you can get into. It didn’t bother us. We just didn’t want to fly home. We wanted to go by boat.
Aaron Elson: On that march, when you said the three of you on the boat, were these the same three who had walked all the way across Germany?
Larry Bowers: Yes. The same three. We stayed together until we got back to the States.
Aaron Elson: Now you mentioned a blanket. Was that one blanket for the three of you?
Larry Bowers: One blanket apiece.
Aaron Elson: So you would pool the three blankets.
Larry Bowers: Yes. We’d put one down on the straw, and then put two over us, and try to stay warm.
Aaron Elson: Gee, that had to be tough.
Larry Bowers: It was tough. It was tough. But, you know, it’s a growing experience. It really does make you grow up.
Aaron Elson: Did you see anybody like fall by the wayside?
Larry Bowers: Oh yes. There were a lot of them that couldn’t go any further and they’d fall out, and the Germans would take them, you know, we didn’t know what happened to them, but later on we understood that the Germans would take them on the farms and put them to work, because they didn’t have anybody to work those farms. So it was still cold and miserable but they must have had something to do there because they’d put them to work. They didn’t all die. We started out with, I would say about 3,000 of us on that march, three to five, I’m not sure how many it was. But it was about half that many when we got there. But the guards were, they were old guys, I mean they weren’t young people on the thing, they were old guys and they, they just let us do whatever we wanted to do, they didn’t really bother us that much, we could, we had no place to go. Where are you gonna go in the middle of Germany like that? You don’t speak German, how can you get away? I could never figure it out.
Aaron Elson: Where did you get married? Were you married during the war?
Larry Bowers: No. I was not married during the war. I came back and got my discharge in San Antonio, Texas. I was supposed to go to Miami, Florida, and I wired Miami, Florida, and said “Not enough rest or recuperation, please extend,” and I got a wire back that said “Extension refused. Instead of Miami report to San Antonio, Texas.” I went to San Antonio, Texas, and it took them forever. We got halfway through the process of being discharged, and all of a sudden they changed the rules. So then we had to sit there and wait until they got all these new rules put in. I got back just in time to start the quarter at Georgia Tech. I was still in Tech when I went in the service, Georgia Tech, and came back and started back as a co-op(?), not a co-op, I was a co-op before but a student at Georgia Tech. Finished under the GI bill. And then I got married, after I finished there. We’ve been married for fifty years.
Aaron Elson: My goodness!
Larry Bowers: Fifty years January the 9th of this year.
Aaron Elson: Fantastic. What kind of work did you do after the war? Oh, you were telling me ...
Larry Bowers: Heating and air conditioning, manufacturers of heating and air conditioning. I was mostly in sales and marketing management in heating and air conditioning.
Aaron Elson: Now let me ask you, in heating and air conditioning sales, do they ever have conventions or trade associations?
Larry Bowers: Sure.
Aaron Elson: When you go to one of those, and they start telling heating and air conditioning stories, how do those stories compare to the stories that you hear at one of these reunions?
Larry Bowers: Oh, I don’t think there’s any comparison. In the heating and air conditioning stories, you know, there’s just not that many stories in heating and air conditioning. You’ve either got the right system or got the wrong system, but you know, you make it right, whatever. And it’s, sometimes you have some equipment that doesn’t work real good but it works long enough so that you can find the answer to it and when the time comes you’ll replace it, whatever. But there’s no comparison to the stories. And I think the thing that was as interesting as anything is, when we were in prison camp, we banned bailout stories. We made it so nobody could tell a bailout story anymore. There were some of the most phenomenal bailout stories you ever heard in there. I mean just crazy. They were unbelievable. And yet the guys were there that were telling them so they could have been true, but we decided they were just so bad we wouldn’t have them anymore. (Laughs). It was really funny. You should have heard those, I mean you’d have loved that, now, you’d love to have a tape of all those stories. They were some of the most phenomenal things.
Aaron Elson: Can you remember any of them?
Larry Bowers: Oh, one guy rode down in a tail. He was in the tail turret and the plane blew apart, and he was in the tail and he ended up going all the way to the ground in the tail and surviving. And, you know, how do you do that? It’s almost unheard of that you could do that. But he did. There was one guy that was blown out of the ship and didn’t have his chute, and he was falling but he came to, he looked around and there’s his parachute. He reaches over, puts it on, pulls the cord and saves himself (laughs). You can see how wild they were. There were lots of them like that, too. There were a lot of amusing things. If you didn’t have a sense of humor I don’t think you could survive something like that.
Aaron Elson: Do you have children?
Larry Bowers: I have four children, six grandchildren. No great-grandchildren yet. All my children turned out good. My daughter just went out to see her son in Seattle, Washington. Her son works for a company that one of my sons worked for. He’s got a job offer from one of the manufacturers that they represent. I mean, this is a fabulous offer they got from these people, so he went out to Seattle, Washington. That’s a long way away. And he’s only 25 years old I guess, which is pretty damn good. Making more money than he ever thought he’d make. And he enjoys it. My daughter just went out to see him, went last night.
Aaron Elson: Great. I guess that about does it.
Larry Bowers: We moved around a little bit. When I went to work first, when I got back and got out of college, the first place they sent me was to Evansville, Indiana for training. This was with Servel, I don’t know if you ever heard of gas air conditioning or not, Servel gas air conditioning, that’s who I went to work for, and they sent us up there for training for a month, and they kept talking about one job that they needed a special person for. Anyway, I was picked for that job. It was on Omaha, Nebraska. So I went to Omaha and spent three years there and then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota and spent three years there and then Kansas City and three years there, and then Marshalltown, Iowa, and three years there, and then back to Atlanta, thank the Lord.
Aaron Elson: And every time you moved you had to like get a house?
Larry Bowers: Oh yeah. I’ve had five houses in 15 years.
Aaron Elson: What was that one job they needed a special person for?
Larry Bowers: Oh, it was sales of gas air conditioning. And they had a big territory, I mean it covered, out of Omaha it covered all of North and South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, all those states. That’s a lot of traveling. But, the thing I said about Servel gas air conditioners, the only company I ever worked for where you knew every customer personally, because they always had problems with the product, believe me. Well, if we’re through, that’s fine.
Aaron Elson: I guess that covers it.
Larry Bowers: Okay. I’ll tell you a cute story. You want a cute story?
Aaron Elson: Sure.
Larry Bowers: This is about a blond. This blond got tired of being called a dumb blonde, so she got out the map of the United States and studied all the states and learned all the capitals of all the states of the United States. She went out one night and they started kidding her about being a dumb blonde, she said, “Now wait a minute.” She said, “I know all the capitals of all the states in the United States. Do you know them?” Everybody said, no. She said, “I do.” So there was a long pause and somebody said, “Well, what’s the capital of Georgia?” She thought and thought and thought. Finally she said, “G.” (Laughs) That’s cute, isn’t it?
