"I was just one of those guys who 'got along,'" says William "Bill" Carpenter of himself. But that modest outlook has served him well for nearly nine decades, especially through a 23-year career with the military that began during World War II.
Born in Williamsport, Bill lived his early years there. His parents, John and Florence Carpenter, owned the Old Corner Hotel in Williamsport, but his father suffered from poor health, so Bill, his brother Jim and sister Peg also spent a good deal of time living with their grandparents in Flemington.
Bill in fact graduated from Lock Haven High School in 1938 and says he made an attempt at college.
"I tried one year of college, but that was a waste. Jim was the one with the brains; I was just one of those guys who got along."
So instead of school, Bill went to work at the paper mill. Around that same time, he started dating a classmate, Hazel Straub, who lived in the section of Lock Haven that was once known as Straubtown because of the many Straub's who lived there.
"A friend asked me to come along with him to another friend's house one night," remembers Bill. "Hazel was there. I didn't know it at the time, but she was engaged. I made a date with her - I called her 'Haze' - and we went for a walk around town. After that, we began courting, and we were married on May 28 of 1942."
Just four months after their wedding, Bill went into the Army and began service with the Army Air Force. He was inducted at Pennsylvania's Fort Indiantown Gap, then was sent to St. Petersburg, Fla., and on to Buckley Air Field in Colorado for training.
The U.S. Army Air Corps had just opened its Technical Training School at Buckley Field. The school consisted of bombardier and armorer training for aircrewmen on the B-17 and B-24 bomber planes (Bill studied armaments there). In addition, some 50,000 airmen received initial basic training at the site during the War.
"It was beautiful country," remembers Bill of Colorado. "It was around Christmastime, and I remember I went down to the USO and different ladies asked if we wanted to go out for a dinner. They were taking servicemen home for a Christmas meal."
"It was also the first time I ever saw a Quonset hut," he adds with a laugh. "I got to see many more after that!"
Bill's next stop was at an air base in the San Francisco area of California.
"We played softball there. It's also where I received my first promotion, my first stripe to corporal. We got a semblance of basic training; they shot over our heads and we crawled under barbed wire!"
While in California, Bill was notified by telegraph. "You have a son. Doing fine." His son, Raymond William Carpenter was born February 19, 1943. Bill says his son was also called Bill because, "there were too many 'Raymonds down there in Straubtown."
Bill's next assignment was at Tonopah Army Air Field, a training airfield in Nevada.
"While there, I got a chance to take a furlough, so I hitchhiked down to Reno and came home," says Bill. "I threw a couple of stones at Hazel's window and she came out and got me and took me over to my son's bedroom and I saw Billy for the first time. He was three months old."
At Tonopah, Bill says his unit was assigned to work on the P-39 fighter planes.
"That aircraft had cannons that shot through the nose of plane, and it also carried a machine gun that was able to shoot through the plane's propeller," he recalls.
After training, Bill was sent to New York to await orders for Europe.
"Hazel met me there," he says. "We got a hotel and spent the night. I told her, if I don't call or show up tomorrow night, you go home. The next day, I ended up boarding the Queen Elizabeth, headed for Scotland."
"The trip across was something else," remembers Bill. "One day, you were supposed to sleep upstairs on deck. The next day, you'd sleep in the berth. We sailed into Glasgow and they loaded us onto a train and we ended up at a base near Saxmunden, in England."
Bill was assigned to the 357th Fighter Group, part of the 363rd Fighter Squadron. The air combat unit operated the P-51 Mustang aircraft, one of the War's best fighter planes. The 357th flew more than 300 combat missions between February of 1944 and April of 1945. It is officially credited by the Air Force with having destroyed 595 German airplanes in the air and 106 on the ground.
Ever modest, Bill tries to minimize his role as part of the ground crew during that critical period in our country's history.
"All I did while we were there was load the guns and ammo, clean the guns, and load bombs on the wings. The P-51s were the fighter planes that protected the bomber planes. I remember the invasion of Normandy. You would have never envisioned the number of planes that flew over. I'd never seen so many planes B-19 and B-24 bombers wave after wave of them."
Bill's service in England lasted two-and-a-half years. After the war ended, his group was flown to Germany, then back to the states and Bill came home and resumed working shift work at the paper mill.
But his story of service doesn't end there.
"I was walking down the street one day and saw this old sergeant I had known in California, and I got recruited again," he laughs. "So I went back in as a sergeant and was there another 20 years."
Bill was again serving in the Army Air Force, and his first assignment was at Roswell Army Airfield in New Mexico.
"The lieutenant said, 'We have plenty of armament people, so I'd like you to go over and work on the airplanes,' so I worked on the B-29 planes," says Bill, who served there for about five years. He had brought Hazel and their son with him to New Mexico.
"We wanted to rent a place, but Mrs. Parr, the owner, said she didn't want any children. I said, 'Well, I'll shoot him (referring to son Billy).' She laughed and we went and talked to her husband, and they ended up letting us rent the back of their place."
"Every year, for about three months, we'd take the B-29s to England, so I'm back in England again," says Bill. "In the meantime, I got promoted to senior master sergeant three stripes up and two down! I was there in Roswell when we went from Army Air Force to Air Force."
Roswell was also where Bill got his driver's license for the first time.
"One Sunday afternoon, one of the sergeants came down and he wanted me to drive one of his cars to Spokane, Washington. I didn't have a driver's license. I'd never had a car, so I never got a license. So, we went into Roswell the next day to get me a license and the guy at the licensing center was waiting on a cab to go home and eat. The sergeant said, 'He'll drive you,' referring to me. So I took him home and came back for him and got him back to the office, after which he handed me my driver's license!"
"After that, we packed up the two cars and I followed the sergeant to Spokane to Fairchild Air Force Base," says Bill. "When we arrived, he got a house first because he had seniority. We went out and lived with him, then we finally got a place."
At Fairchild, Bill was part of the B-36 program.
"One night, we were working on an airplane engine. A captain was in charge of our outfit and he was sitting in a nice warm car and I'm up there with my crew at midnight, changing a part on the plane's cylinder. The situation agitated me, so I made some remarks. A couple of days later, I'm transferred as an inspector for the B-36 aircraft. They were taking the planes to England and needed an inspector, so guess who got the job!"
"I taught Hazel to drive before I left for England," adds Bill. "In all, we made about four trips there with different aircraft, always to different places and never to where I had been during the war."
It was while Bill was in Spokane that he ran into a couple of soldiers from home.
"I was taking Billy to school one morning and I ran into Bill Bressler, who was from Flemington. Then, one night, we were working and a fellow came in on a B-36. We got to talking and I found out he was from Castanea. Those were the only two times that I ran into people from home in 23 years."
Bill next received orders to go to Germany.
"When we first got the assignment, it said we were to go to Munich, where I had been at the close of the War. But that wasn't to be. They transferred our outfit to Frankfurt, so I was back to working on the B-29 planes with a radar evaluation squadron. I was a maintenance line chief we had B-29s and B-25s. Then they broke up our outfit so I worked on the C-130 airplanes. I was there in Frankfurt for about three years before coming back to the states."
"Every place we were stationed, my mother and father-in-law came to visit," remembers Bill. "While we were in Germany, they spent a couple of months there. It was a nice break to have them with us."
Back in the U.S., Bill was stationed at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina.
"I was in the B-52 program there. That's a monster," he says of the jet-powered strategic bomber plane. "I was a crew chief and was there for a couple of years."
It was during that time that Bill's son dropped a bomb of his own.
"Billy came home one day after he had graduated from high school and told us he had enlisted in the Army. I'm in the Air Force and my son enlists in the Army! I took him to Raleigh, North Carolina to Fort Bragg. He seemed so frail, I cried. But, he went on his way and he managed."
Bill's final assignment was at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where he again served as a line chief.
"We had a bunch of B-52s and about 10 tanker aircraft. I was in charge of all of the men working on the airplanes," says Bill. "We spent a couple of years in Florida. I had 23 years in and I was 44, so Hazel and I decided we had better come home."
Shortly after Bill and Hazel returned to the area, Hazel's father suffered a stroke and Bill took care of him for a time. The couple then moved to Bensalem and Bill went to work for Boeing Aircraft in Philadelphia.
"They were making helicopters. I was there for about two years and then the facility closed and I was out of a job," says Bill. "A friend told us they were hiring people in Baltimore, so we went there. Here, they were jobs at a race track. They said I was over-qualified, but darned if they didn't hire me. They wanted me to work out of Columbus, Ohio. Hazel wasn't too eager about that but I said, 'It's a job.'"
Bill worked at horse tracks for the company, called the American Totalization Company.
"I'm working on the ticket machines, maintaining them while people are betting," he says. "There were two tracks in Columbus where I worked eight months of the year and then I worked the other four months at locations all along the East Coast. I was everywhere from Cincinnati, to Philly and Florida. I even went to the Kentucky Derby a couple of times. I also worked at a dog track and at a jai alai track. I spent the last four or five years, until I was 65, in Philadelphia, working at tracks. It was six days a week there. As it ended up, I spent 18 years with this outfit!"
After retirement, Bill and Hazel came back to central PA and bought a home in Dunnstown, where they lived for the next 18 years. Nearly four years ago, the couple moved into the Oakridge Personal Care Home along the Renovo Road. Bill and Hazel had been married 66 years when Hazel passed away two years ago.
"We went through a lot together," says Bill lovingly of his wife. "I was blessed with a wonderful family and with a precious, wonderful wife. Hazel and I had a good life. We travelled for 40 years, so we were happy to come home."
"At one point, our son was in the hospital in Atlanta and Hazel saw these ceramic angels there and she started collecting them it became her hobby. She had a gillion angels. I still keep some of them and I've given others to family."
Bill's son today lives in Georgia. He also has a granddaughter and a great-grandson. His sister, Peg Heverly, lives in Mifflinburg. Like Bill's son, her husband, Cliff, served in the Army. Bill's brother, the late Jim Carpenter, served in the Navy, and his daughter, Judy, along with a nephew, Steve Caskey from Hazel's side of the family, are among the local relatives Bill enjoys seeing.
As for Bill, who describes himself as, "89 working on 90," he's still just trying to 'get along.' An avid walker who has worn out many pair of shoes over the years, he says he now tries to use his stationary bicycle every day for 30 minutes.
"During the War years, it was a snap. We were there in one place, then it was all over with," says Bill, referring to his time in England during World War II. "And then during my 20 years afterwards, I have to say I really enjoyed the people I worked with they were all good people. If I hadn't gone back (into the military), I wouldn't have had the money to retire with. I still tell people, it's a good life, but you have to make a commitment to it."
