Legacies Project Oral History: Elliot Valenstein

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 11:51am

When: 2022

Transcript

[00:00:12] FEMALE_1: This is an interview for The Legacies Project, which has students gathering oral histories and putting them into an archive for future generations. To the best of your ability, please ignore the camera. While your eyes may certainly wander, maybe look at, and please do not directly look at the camera lens. Each video tape is about 50 minutes long. If you are in the middle of answering a question, we have to change tape. I'll ask you to hold that thought while we changed tape and we'll pick up where we left off on the new tape. You can call for a break any time that you want one. Also, please remember that you can decline to answer any question or terminate the interview at anytime for any reason. I'm first going to ask you some simple demographic questions. While these questions may jog memories, please keep them answers brief and to the point. We can elaborate later in the interview. Please say and spell your name.
[00:01:10] Elliot Valenstein: It's Elliot Valenstein and spelling it as E-L-L-I-O-T, and Valenstein is V as in victory, A-L-E-N-S-T-E-I-N.
[00:01:21] FEMALE_1: What is your birthday, including the year?
[00:01:24] Elliot Valenstein: December 9th, 1923.
[00:01:27] FEMALE_1: How would you describe your ethnic background?
[00:01:34] Elliot Valenstein: I'd say it's for these culturally, pretty much New York City. I grew up first 18 years and I come from a Jewish family. But we weren't religious and I certainly was not. I guess that's a brief answer.
[00:01:50] FEMALE_1: What is the highest level of formal education you have completed? Did you attend any additional school or formal career training beyond what you completed?
[00:01:59] Elliot Valenstein: I have a PhD. A doctorate degree?
[00:02:05] FEMALE_1: What is your marital status?
[00:02:07] Elliot Valenstein: I'm married and have been for 67, 68.
[00:02:15] FEMALE_1: How many children do you have?
[00:02:16] Elliot Valenstein: I have two.
[00:02:18] FEMALE_1: How many siblings do you have?
[00:02:21] Elliot Valenstein: I had one.
[00:02:23] FEMALE_1: What would you consider your primary occupation to have been?
[00:02:28] Elliot Valenstein: A professor and research scientist.
[00:02:32] FEMALE_1: At what age did you retire?
[00:02:37] Elliot Valenstein: I hadn't set of phase-out retirement, so roughly around 72.
[00:02:44] FEMALE_1: Now, we can begin the first part of her interview, beginning with some of the things you can recall about your family history. We're beginning with family name and history. By this we mean any story about your last or first name or family traditions in selecting first or middle names. Do you know any stories about your family name?
[00:03:04] Elliot Valenstein: Well, it's a very brief story. My paternal side of the family came from Germany and my name was originally spelled with a W, probably, the family name. And W in German it's pronounced as a V. I heard somewhere, when my grandfather came to this country, when he said Valenstein, which was sort of a German pronunciation, they just put it as a V. Everyone that spell the name the same way I do is related, and we haven't found an exception to that and some people have made an effort. But that's about all. [LAUGHTER]
[00:03:45] FEMALE_1: Are there any naming traditions in your family?
[00:03:48] Elliot Valenstein: Not really.
[00:03:48] FEMALE_1: No. Do you know why your ancestors left to come to the United States?
[00:03:59] Elliot Valenstein: Not really. I know some of the stories about them coming, but not the specific reason. My maternal side of the family came from Russia. They must have had some money because they came around 1875 and they travel easily through Europe, and my uncle Max was left in Heidelberg where he went to the university. So I gathered they did have some money. We came under reasonably comfortable circumstances. On the maternal side, my grandfather came with two brothers. They were just teenagers, probably not much older than you are right now, and came along and settled in New York City. Older one of the brothers settled in Baltimore. That was just shortly after the Civil War, around 1870.
[00:05:01] FEMALE_1: How did they make a living in the United States?
[00:05:08] Elliot Valenstein: I'm a little vague about that. I had very little contact with my grandparents and my grandfather died before I was born on maternal side. My paternal grandfather was quite old. We used to visit him occasionally. He didn't speak English very well. It was a strange visit as a young child going there occasionally on a Sunday. I'm not sure how he made a living. He certainly was not a professional.
[00:05:40] FEMALE_1: To your knowledge, did they make an effort to preserve any traditions or costumes from their country of origin?
[00:05:46] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I had almost no contact with my maternal grandparents. My paternal grandparents spoke Yiddish mostly around, and that's strange to me on them because we've had little contact for those Sunday visits. I'm sure he maintained religious traditions and went to the synagogue pretty regularly, if not every morning.
[00:06:21] FEMALE_1: Are there any traditions that your family has given up or changed?
[00:06:26] Elliot Valenstein: Well, certainly, my immediate family and my sons are not at all religious, so they certainly had very little contact. My sons had almost no contact at all with their great grandfather, so I would say no to that.
[00:06:49] FEMALE_1: What stories have come down to you about your parents and grandparents?
[00:06:54] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I told once that I was named after my maternal grandfather coming from Russia. I had an urge to find stories and I don't know how reliable they were that made the family seem more important than they were, claiming that my grandfather came from a family that were mayors of a town on the eastern side of Germany, Poznan, which is a town that was half a time in the hands of Poland and half the time in the hands of Germany, dependent upon what period you're talking about.
[00:07:36] FEMALE_1: Do you know any courtship stories? How did your parents, grandparents, and other relatives come to meet and marry.
[00:07:42] Elliot Valenstein: I've got none of those.
[00:07:47] FEMALE_1: That's fine. This part of the interview is about your childhood up until you began attending school. Even if these questions jog memories about other times in your life, please only respond with memories from the earliest part of your life. Where did you grow up and what are your strongest memories of that place?
[00:08:05] Elliot Valenstein: I grew up in New York City. I spent the first 18 years in New York City. We were apartment dwellers, as most New York City people are. We moved around three or four times. We lived in the Bronx for a while and Upper Manhattan, which was an interesting experience. This is not prior to school. I don't have very many memories prior to elementary school, starting school. But Upper Manhattan was very much unlike what most people think of growing up in New York City, at least at that time but I meant there. There was a lot of green space, some of it pretty wild, and we used to, wander through and thinking we were finding Indian arrowheads. There was an Indian tribe that lived there on a reservation in one of these natural areas. It was a part of Manhattan with two rivers came together, the Hudson and the Harlem River, the East River it's sometimes called. With all this wilderness, it was growing up with a lot of outdoor space like we came from a small town somewhere in the Midwest.
[00:09:19] FEMALE_1: I didn't know that. What was your apartment like, if you can remember?
[00:09:23] Elliot Valenstein: It was a reasonable apartment. I think we had only two bedrooms. I had a sister.
[00:09:39] Elliot Valenstein: It was nothing really especially outstanding about them.
[00:09:46] FEMALE_1: How many people lived in your house with you when you were growing up?
[00:09:51] Elliot Valenstein: There were four of us. My parents, my father and my sister.
[00:09:57] FEMALE_1: What languages were spoken in or around your household?
[00:10:00] Elliot Valenstein: Just English.
[00:10:01] FEMALE_1: Just English. What about around the neighborhood?
[00:10:08] Elliot Valenstein: Well, English, but primarily the neighborhood had changed and when we came back, it became almost a completely Latined Caribbean area. But when I was growing up, it was half Irish and half Jewish. Maybe not completely 50/50. There were probably other people as well, but pre-dominantly. There were some Jewish refugees from Germany that were living there at that time.
[00:10:43] FEMALE_1: What was your family like when you were a child?
[00:10:51] Elliot Valenstein: I suppose, not exceptional in any way. My father was a pretty good ball player and we spent a lot of times on a ball around. We even had a father/son, Sunday morning ball game. I remember playing with him, but he used to go off to work every day and I was pretty much on my own and it was very different than I think Julian said, hey, we made our own games. We played in schoolyards and played ball games and all kinds of kick the can games and so on.
[00:11:34] FEMALE_1: What work did your father and mother do?
[00:11:38] Elliot Valenstein: My mother mostly was a housewife or one period during the Depression, she worked as a sales clerk for a department store in New York City. My father had jobs which really didn't have a title. He was not a professional. He tended to work for firms and be in a managerial capacity because he was very conscientious. Always was the first one working at work and the last one to leave and the people who own the various companies that he worked for. It was small companies. Tended to rely on him and take off on vacations while he ran the enterprise, but there wasn't any real title for the jobs that he had.
[00:12:44] FEMALE_1: Can you recall your earliest memory?
[00:12:46] Elliot Valenstein: [LAUGHTER] Yes. [LAUGHTER] It's the earliest memory and a silly one. I think it was kindergarten and for some reason, I don't know if it was my birthday or holiday when we're taking a break. The teacher must have liked me and she gave me a kiss on the cheeks and she put a jar of candy in my pocket, sneak them in there. It's funny that that should do my earliest memory, but it is. [LAUGHTER]
[00:13:17] FEMALE_1: This is talking about your preschool years, which might be hard to remember, but do you know what you did for fun in those years?
[00:13:25] Elliot Valenstein: Preschool? No.
[00:13:26] FEMALE_1: No. Did you have a favorite toy?
[00:13:28] Elliot Valenstein: No.
[00:13:32] FEMALE_1: Were there any special days, events, or family traditions you remember from this time?
[00:13:38] Elliot Valenstein: Not really family traditions, no.
[00:13:43] FEMALE_1: We will discuss your time as a young person from about the time that school attended typically begins in the United States up until you began your professional career or work-life. Did you go to preschool?
[00:13:57] Elliot Valenstein: No.
[00:13:58] FEMALE_1: Did you go to kindergarten? Where and what do you remember about it?
[00:14:02] Elliot Valenstein: Almost nothing. [LAUGHTER] Sorry.
[00:14:05] FEMALE_1: No problem. Did you go to elementary school?
[00:14:08] Elliot Valenstein: Oh, yes, of course. Public elementary school.
[00:14:14] FEMALE_1: Do you remember anything about it?
[00:14:17] Elliot Valenstein: Yes. I remember some exciting things as a matter of fact. We moved into a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan that I mentioned after we left the apartment in the Bronx and I guess I was certain like sixth grade or seventh grade, but I remember the school district that I moved into had an intermediate school, whatever you call that. I guess junior high school or something, but I was in the middle of that and so I had to go to school or just out of the district, which at that time, normal straight eighth grade elementary school. I had to travel a little distance to school and I guess I was a little bit wild and mischievous, which really meant that. I didn't carry knives and guns to school. But I probably talked a little bit too much food around with some of the other boys and push them. Teacher went on a rampage trying to control me and she's literally chasing me around the classroom and in and out and around the seats. I do remember that. That's pretty spectacular.
[00:15:45] FEMALE_1: Did you go to high school? Where and what do you remember about it?
[00:15:48] Elliot Valenstein: I went through high school in the area. I was on the track team and had some good friends at that school. I wasn't a great student. I read a lot. I guess I knew a lot from books, but I almost never did my homework. A great memory was, I never told my parents, mostly my brother when parents visiting day was, but she always found out. [LAUGHTER] I was sitting in a French class, as I remember, and sitting, the two middle rows were right together, whereas the other rows had a little space between them. So I had someone sitting on the side of me and much to my luck, the door opened and there was my butter coming into the classroom. I had no idea and I had not done my homework and I knew what was going to happen. As soon as she came in and the teacher introduced herself, she calls on me for the translation, which I hadn't even looked at. I grabbed the book from the nerd who was sitting next to me and he fought and resisted, but I did something to him. He had neatly, the whole translation, all of it now and I just read that off and he got through that close call.
[00:17:23] FEMALE_1: What about your school experience? Is it different from school as you know it today?
[00:17:30] Elliot Valenstein: All it was much less experimental, I guess, you might call it, a traditional school. We did have what was called a New York City regents exams. When you've completed a block of courses like three years in French, you took a regent exam. If you were going to go to college and they looked at those and mathematics, you took a regent's exam. I think they only exist in New York City, even to this day, those exams, but they were college entry tickets. But there was less experimental. Someone up in Albany where they had New York State School system was, decided what you should take if you were college or anything. You had to take two languages and you had to take a certain amount of math. There were almost no electives that I can remember. No interesting programs at least that I was exposed to, like this legacy program that you people are exposed to. It was a very traditional school where everything was prescribed and know what separation between those who they were planning on going to college and I was going to go to trade school or just not go on beyond high school.
[00:19:07] FEMALE_1: Did you go to school or career training beyond high school?
[00:19:11] Elliot Valenstein: No. I went into the army. I turned 18 on December 9th and December 7th. I'm talking about 1941, was when Pearl Harbor took place. I enlisted and I went into the army immediately after high school. I finished mid year in high school because of my moving around between areas. I turned 18 two days after Pearl Harbor and I enlisted in the Army about two weeks after that.
[00:19:49] FEMALE_1: Please describe the popular music of this time.
[00:19:53] Elliot Valenstein: I wasn't tuned in as much as other people to music. It was mostly swing bands. Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, and people like that and I was aware of it and you couldn't help us listen to some of it, but I wasn't closely following it or studying it. I was mostly interested in athletics.
[00:20:16] FEMALE_1: Did the music have any particular dances associated with it?
[00:20:19] Elliot Valenstein: Yeah. I learned to dance to Green Eyes and Amapola, two songs that they were on the flip side of records, if you know what they are. [LAUGHTER].
[00:20:30] FEMALE_1: What were the popular clothing or hair styles at the time?
[00:20:35] Elliot Valenstein: I wasn't aware. It seemed to me that way in high school at that time, we're not as aware of styles and having to wear the right sneakers. If some people were, I was not doing it to that. I just wore whatever. We didn't wear as many jeans as people wear today, but nothing out of the ordinary and I don't recall any special fashion set I had to pay attention to.
[00:21:08] FEMALE_1: Were there any slang terms, phrases or words used that aren't in common use today?
[00:21:17] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I used one the other day and my son was a little puzzled. I said then I was doing that forever for escape by skatie eight years. He said how many years? I said skatie eight. It turned out I didn't remember correctly in that period when I was in high-school. It was a term that people used that referred to some long, indefinite period of time. I don't remember a lot of specialist slang words.
[00:21:53] FEMALE_1: What was a typical day for you in high-school?
[00:21:59] Elliot Valenstein: Well I was on the track team. That was something I looked forward to, and depending upon the season, around different distances indoors or outdoors or cross-country in the fall and it was like 8:00-3:00, I should say. Classroom day. You asked me about school mainly?
[00:22:30] FEMALE_1: Yeah school routine.
[00:22:32] Elliot Valenstein: I'm just going to classes [LAUGHTER] and after good working out on the track team and wondering if I could get through without having done my homework. [LAUGHTER]
[00:22:49] FEMALE_1: Was there a grade requirement for track? Did you have to have a certain grade?
[00:22:54] Elliot Valenstein: I wasn't aware of it. I guess I had, if there was one, I had my grades were despite not being too conscientious, they were, I had a quick, I don't recall that ever being a problem students not having sufficient grades and would not stay on the team. I guess as long as they weren't thrown out of school, they could be on the team.
[00:23:19] FEMALE_1: Was there anything besides track you did for fun in high school?
[00:23:24] Elliot Valenstein: No. Sorry.
[00:23:29] FEMALE_1: No problem.
[00:23:31] Elliot Valenstein: If there was a prom, I don't remember it, I didn't go.
[00:23:41] FEMALE_1: Did your family have any special sayings or expressions?
[00:23:46] Elliot Valenstein: Not really.
[00:23:49] FEMALE_1: Any changes in your family life during your school years?
[00:23:52] Elliot Valenstein: Well, yes. Because there was a depression that was going on in the third reason. My family had hard times. My father, there was this period when he was out of work. We weren't sure where the rent was going to come from for our apartment. That created a certain amount of stress which I was aware of. My father would sometimes have to borrow money from relatives and go from month to month eventually then straightened out. But this went on for several years and it was a very bad period when there was enormous amount of people unemployed and it was throughout the country.
[00:24:45] FEMALE_1: Which holidays did your family celebrate and how our holidays traditionally celebrated in your family?
[00:24:54] Elliot Valenstein: Mostly the national holidays. I think my father, even though he wasn't really religious, his father was quite religious, the so-called high Jewish holidays, Yum. Kept in Russia shown, I think he would show up at the synagogue. We were aware that we didn't particularly have any celebration. We were aware that the US holidays, July 4th and so on. Occasionally we'd go to a park. When I was very young, I was taken to a parade. Not too long ago, I remember these to be honest, the State parade celebrated the end of World War One, in which occurred on November 11th at 11:00 o'clock. And there was always a big parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City and we went through that. I had a remembrance of that, not too long ago. I remembered, did I really see Civil War veterans in that parade? I did. They were in Civil War uniforms. They were just a few, handful, maybe six or seven. Usually looked like they were being held up by two younger people on either side and then I did the math and realize 1865, I was born in '23. When I was going to pray to maybe I was seven or eight or nine. That was '31. If you do the math, you can say that someone who was in the mid '80s from the Civil War could have been around. But it just seemed amazing to me that I had actually seen Civil War veterans.
[00:26:48] FEMALE_1: What about Hanukkah and Christmas, were those celebrated?
[00:26:50] Elliot Valenstein: Yeah, we did like candles for Hanukkah. Didn't celebrate Christmas.
[00:26:57] FEMALE_1: What special food traditions does your family have?
[00:27:00] Elliot Valenstein: I would say anything, no traditions and my mother made dishes which I thought were favorites but they weren't around, there was no tradition with them.
[00:27:09] FEMALE_1: Have any of your mothers recipes been past on?
[00:27:16] Elliot Valenstein: Not really many. My sister, I think knew some and we may have acquired some too, too hard, but not very many special ones.
[00:27:25] FEMALE_1: When thinking back on your school years, what important social or historical events were taking place at that time, and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[00:27:35] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I mentioned the depression, which is a major thing for lots of people at that time. It was also, and this will be a surprise to younger people I think, there was a very strong isolationists movement that at that time, even before the war started. When it looked like there was going to be a war in Europe, a lot of people who wanted to make sure that we stayed out of that war, which we didn't. There were a lot of German sympathizers in New York City at that time and maybe to a lesser extent now, had regions of the city that people from different countries settled and it was of course, that Chinatown and there was also a German section in New York and Manhattan. There were a lot of Germans sympathizers. There were some of these people were really inclined towards fascism. They had rallies on street corners. They wore brown shirts like the German Nazi storm-troopers would wear. They'd get on street corners and bike rallies and they were blatantly making all anti-Semitic remarks. I was like 14 or 15 and I wanted to shout back at them but they had some very big guys who were just waiting for anyone to start trouble. Well, that was a frightening experience at that time for a 14 year old.
[00:29:23] FEMALE_1: Did you experience any anti-Semitism?
[00:29:26] Elliot Valenstein: I guess among playing football and so on. There are clearly some people who made anti-Semitic remarks, but not other than carrying some of that and maybe getting into a fight once or twice over it. I didn't experience anything else other than that. There were a lot of signs of it. There was a time when driving out to where there were a lot of resorts outside of New York State, you could see signs outside. Some of them would say Christians only. Clearly anti-Semitic implications. Was a very different period than today, even after World War II. I'm talking about before the start of World War II. There were films made like Gentlemen's Agreement which was a film which a journalist was asked by his editor to find out what it's like to be a Jew in America and he decided to, although passed himself off as a Jew, to see what kind of responses. But the point I'm making is that there was a lot of anti-Semitism after that particular time, the late 30s and some of it was associated with the affiliation with the Germans in this country. Charles Lindbergh, the great hero, was actually submitted and very pro-German, even during the Nazi period before we got involved in war. This German American button days it was called had a rally in Madison Square Garden, which is the big sports arena, and they filled the whole sports arena with a rally with Nazi swastika flags hanging over the balcony. Yes, I'm not making this up. This can be really historical fact. It took place, I might be off a year, but I would say it was probably around '37 or '38, 1937 or '38.
[00:32:01] FEMALE_1: I don't I don't even know. It's so scary.
[00:32:04] Elliot Valenstein: Yes, it was scary.
[00:32:08] FEMALE_1: That's all for today. We got through our questions for today. Thank you so much.
[00:32:14] Elliot Valenstein: You didn't get to the point where I turned around my life. Became a good guy. [OVERLAPPING]
[00:32:25] FEMALE_1: I mean, I guess we can start off by just let me ask you. Do you remember anything from our last meeting that you would like to add?
[00:32:32] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I think I talked a little bit about the depression, and I talked about the German-American bond and those demonstrations before the war started.
[00:32:44] FEMALE_1: I was very startled.
[00:32:45] Elliot Valenstein: Yeah, I know. I just surprised most people when I tell them that there were rallies, [OVERLAPPING] pro-Nazi, pro German anti-semitic rallies in New York City. They filled Madison Square Garden hanging American flags and Nazi swastikas over their balconies. Sorry about that. I guess we're almost ready to go to war.
[00:33:19] FEMALE_1: Anything about the depression you would like to add?
[00:33:23] Elliot Valenstein: I think I mentioned, as everyone now knows, bread lines and people were out of work and my father and out of work for a while. There was a lot of tension because we had to pay the rent for an apartment every month and it wasn't clear where that was coming from.
[00:33:43] MALE_1: Were you ever tempted to steal food maybe?
[00:33:46] Elliot Valenstein: No. I can't say that I ever went hungry. [OVERLAPPING] I mean, we managed somehow to put food on the table, but things like paying rent was a problem. I think my father even got to the point where he had to sell some things to a pawn shop which startled me in order to meet next month's rent and there was tension with the family members some of whom were a little better off and that hit. I feel badly about the depression, but many of them holding on tightly to their money not knowing what's coming next, and not willing to part with any of it to help out. There was that kind of tension.
[00:34:27] FEMALE_1: Do you recall any of FDR's programs of the time?
[00:34:32] Elliot Valenstein: Yes. I know whenever he spoke, they call them fireside chats, you know that. You could walk down the street, there was no television, just radios and you could hear the speech just walking down the street without missing anything. It just seemed like it was radiating out of all of the buildings. The same was still for some sporting events. Like the Joe Louis fought with Max Schmeling who was a German, and that became like the beginning of a war almost. And Max Schmeling won the first fight. Then there was a rematch which Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling I think in the first round. But in any case, you could just walk down the streets and hear that whole fight from radios. Everyone was tuned in and everyone was tuned into Roosevelt's fireside chats.
[00:35:37] FEMALE_1: Did your family have to utilize any of the programs or could you know of anyone who utilized any of these programs?
[00:35:45] Elliot Valenstein: Well, there were a lot of programs, but there were things like CCC, there were camps that did a lot of very good things in Bill's pox and murals for artists who were doing things. My family was not directly affected by any of that.
[00:36:08] FEMALE_1: And you mentioned that your mother had to work. What did she go into?
[00:36:15] Elliot Valenstein: Was just selling in the apartments.
[00:36:16] FEMALE_1: Okay. From now we're going to go into adulthood. This set of questions covers a relatively large period of your life. From the time you completed your education, entered the labor force and started a family until all of your children left home and you or your spouse retired from work. We're possibly talking about a stretch of time spanning as much as four decades. To begin, after you finished high school, where did you live?
[00:36:48] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I lived with my family but I graduated mid-year for some strange reason, I think I may have mentioned that, and the war broke out very suddenly. I can remember very clearly coming out of a matinee movie theater and seeing people were just milling around in crowds. I knew something had happened, I didn't quite know it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and the war started immediately after that. I had just turned 18 on the 9th of December and Pearl Harbor was bombed two days before that. And two weeks after that, I graduated from high school and I enlisted in the army but in a program in the signal core where I went to an army school, but not yet fully active in the army, but it was in an army program. In a sense, I listed right after graduating high school, would have been drafted, I was 18 and eligible. I stayed in that program for about 6-9 months, learning basic electronics, learning the Morse code and how to use a Morse code key. Then I was close up to active duty in the '42. The war started really at the beginning of '42 or the end of '41. I was called to active duty and went into what was called an induction center in Fort Dix, New Jersey. In which case you've got uniform and a million shots. Left arm and right arm simultaneously getting shots. All kinds of films that people warmed.
[00:38:58] FEMALE_1: What kind of shots were you getting?
[00:39:00] Elliot Valenstein: Well, they were shots,I don't know, I'm sure certainly for tetanus and for all kinds of infections and also some for typhoid and things of that sort which would break out and the people would be subject to in war conditions. Later on I got additional shots when we were going into the Pacific.
[00:39:34] Elliot Valenstein: I was in an induction sector only for about two weeks, it was a frantic thing which you saw a million films. You learned how to salute and who to salute to [LAUGHTER] and I took up a whole battery of tests, which were presumably to assign you intelligently to something that you were fitted for and the army could use. For some reason they decided that I was suitable to be a cryptographer, which involves coding and decoding messages. I don't think I was particularly, [LAUGHTER] any particular talent for that, but these tests seem to indicate that. In any case I was in the signal core as virtue of that early program that I had enrolled in. After two weeks, I present the Camp Crowder , which was in Missouri near the Ozarks.
[00:40:40] FEMALE_1: You were from New Jersey to Missouri?
[00:40:43] Elliot Valenstein: Yeah. I remember we were just told to report and as best as I can remember, we had some passes which meant we can get on the train free. [LAUGHTER] I ended up in Camp Crowder where we took what's called basic training in the army. All the rest in the induction said there was just a general orientation but the induction said they learn how to shoot several guns and through obstacle courses and those who had a long with presumably poison gas with a gas mask and to crawl under what we were told was live bullets, machine guns mounted so we would learn how to crawl in the right way without our rear-end sticking up too high while still holding a rifle in our hand. I was only 18 or few months older than 18 and pretty athletic so all that was a piece of cake for me. Frankly, climbing all those [OVERLAPPING] walls, climbing over walls and swinging on ropes. There was some old guys like 30 years old, they were huffing and puffing, they were married and had kids [LAUGHTER] and I had put on weight and I looked at them, what? This is saying is so easy. [LAUGHTER] In any case, we finished with basic training which took about 2,3 weeks. It wasn't as severe as an infantry basic training, but we did fire a lot of weapons and you had to show a certain degree of proficiency hitting the target. Some people were so blind and so afraid of rifles that they would jump and they would never hit the target and find the people who were in maintaining the target, pulling them up and down, would put what they call pencil holes in the bulls-eye to get them finally going and getting pass so they couldn't move on in their training. I don't know whatever happened, if they thought they could get something during the war. But after that, I do remember, we had a 25 mile hike with a big pack. [OVERLAPPING]
[00:43:17] FEMALE_1: In Missouri ?
[00:43:18] Elliot Valenstein: What?
[00:43:18] FEMALE_1: In Missouri? Where was this?
[00:43:19] Elliot Valenstein: In Missouri. Its part of basic training, the military training. The group, I don't know, must have been several thousand of us. We were big gaps in line as always happens when you're matching because people in the front, they seems to be gaps forming in any kind of line and so we were staggering. There was a German prisoner of war camp right on the army base and I still remember those German soldiers watching us through the wire fences and laughing at each other because we must have looked like a pretty motley crew staggering. This was the Africa Corp in the German army, which was a well-trained.
[00:44:16] MALE_1: Rommel's troops.
[00:44:17] Elliot Valenstein: Rommel's troops exactly. But they were in a prisoner of war camp and but laughing, I remember how angry I felt at them. I always came close to taking the butt of my rifle and hitting it against their fingers but I didn't in any case. When all that was done, I was now going to start cryptography school and I did. The cryptography school was divided into two halves. The first half was all. Did I tell you this before?
[00:44:51] FEMALE_1: You told us at our [inaudible 00:44:52]
[00:44:53] Elliot Valenstein: Yeah. Well, the first part was very mechanical and essentially we did use machines that could put plain English into code and you could use the machine also to decode messages. It is ways of setting it. For each day, you would set it with a different code. Anyway, that lasted for a couple of months and we actually went on onset maneuvers where we got messages, tanks are coming and played soldier. In the Ozarks, I remember it was way below zero, extremely cold. You had to put every bit of clothing on possibly so not to freeze. But when that was all over, I was going to start the second half, which was a much higher level. You had to have a security clearance to get into the second half and if you came from the big city and I came from New York City, it took much longer to get a clearance because you an anonymous in the big city, even if you live in apartment house, you don't really know your neighbor is in the next department. Whereas if you came from a small town that assures the principal of the school and a couple of teachers and they pretty soon would know enough about you to give you the security clearance. I had to wait with some other people that also were waiting and every day we went to look at bulletin board to see if our clearance had come through. One day my name was listed along with others but not to indicate that the security clearance had come through but we're going to pack and get ready to leave.
[00:46:38] FEMALE_1: How many months was this in total put?
[00:46:40] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I was probably in-between the two parts of the course and maybe there was about a month that I was waiting. During that time I was doing what in the army they call policing the area, which really meant picking up cigarette butts and [LAUGHTER] as I start cleaning up the area and doing.
[00:47:00] FEMALE_1: One month.
[00:47:01] Elliot Valenstein: What?
[00:47:01] FEMALE_1: You only had one month of training? Like intensive training?
[00:47:05] Elliot Valenstein: No. One month of intensive training, that's called the basic training but this was a month [OVERLAPPING] waiting for my security clearance. What finally came through was pack my bags, I'm leaving.
[00:47:20] FEMALE_1: Were you eager or were too scared going?
[00:47:23] Elliot Valenstein: I don't think at that age I was scared of anything. I was so naive and didn't really know what war was about, and I thought it was a street fight after school. [LAUGHTER] No, I wasn't quite that naive, but I really didn't think about war and people getting killed. It was just that we had no idea where we were going group of us and we got on a train and went to California. Where we were in Riverside, California, which was a place called a point of debarkation in the army where you got prepared for going overseas. But we had no knowledge of where we were going. We had all kinds of clothing for warm tropical areas and also for cold air areas. We had prolonged woolen overcoat, and we learned a little basic things like if the ship we were on was sinking, how to get off the ship and how to climbed down these ropes and how to unloose your helmet so you don't hit water with a little helmet on a strap and things like that. But soon we were on a ship with no notion of where we were going. It turned out that what had happened was the group I eventually joined lost [inaudible 00:49:00] There 1,000 men were lost when a ship they were on going from North Africa to India was sunk almost as soon as they got started in the Mediterranean by Germans who had a new bomb that was a missile, went a right along the water, they drops on planes, and it hit this boat. Was the old British boat that they took out. That was really in storage and was used as a troop transport, and the boat sank very rapidly. Thousand people were lost in the Mediterranean that was kept secret for the longest time, even after the war. There was never announced. I had to do some research afterwards to find out exactly what had happened. Although the people in the outfit and that we joined who were on the boat and who managed to be picked up, and they were lucky because that happened around six o'clock in the evening getting dark. If you're floating around in the water, you're unlikely to be found, and ships were afraid to stay too long stationary because they would be vulnerable as well. They picked up what they're could and what they could see and many people were lost. But that was the emergency why I suddenly with others was called up to fill that gap that this group needed. We didn't know where we were going, and we ended up stopping for about 36 hours in Australia. It turned out that we landed in Australia right after a naval battle. The Japanese, you may not realize that besides Pearl Harbor, within two months, they had taken the Philippines, they had taken Malaysia, Singapore, good hunk of Burma. Thailand was that time was called Siam. Lot of islands in the Pacific, some of which were US possessions like Wake Island. There was a fear that they were going to invade Australia, so when we landed in Australia, it was right after a naval battle, which I had nothing to do with. The people on the ship, had nothing to do with the Australians great residence heroes. Because the naval battle actually sunk a lot of Japanese ships.
[00:51:53] MALE_1: Is that the Battle of Coral Sea?
[00:51:55] Elliot Valenstein: No. Midway.
[00:51:55] MALE_1: It was the Midway.
[00:52:00] Elliot Valenstein: And the Australians felt that that prevented them from being invaded. There were actually some Japanese that landed in Australia and ransacked a couple of towns, so it was a real possibility that they might have been abated. At that time, it looked like nothing was stopping the Japanese. They were taking everything. I didn't mention anything about China, but they of course had already at an earlier point, had take out a good part of China. In a way amusing because we were being treated as heroes, we didn't deserve any of it. They arranged to have a dance for us, we would 36 hours had had leaves to just let our legs. People were dragging us into the house, to feed us and make a meal. In a way, it was amusing because it was very undeserved. But we were soon back on the ship and still not knowing where we were ending up. And we ended up in India, in Bombay is where we landed on the Western side of India. I can't remember, we had a few days to wander around in Bombay, and it was really exotic with snake charmers in the streets and people trying to sell you everything and offer to clean your ears right on the street, and it was just a very exotic world. But after few days of just stretching, we got on a train to go across India. Took us about a week with open training where the only shelter that we had was to get under the trucks that were on these flat cause of the train when it rained and we joined, not knowing what was going to happen where we were going. We knew we are now in India. We went across Indian. There was a little army camp outside of Calcutta, and then we learned we had joined a heavy Signal Corp construction outfit. Then the Alpha was going to go into Burma to build communication lines to Northern Burma. The part that was not controlled by the Japanese. They bring supplies into China. China was fighting against the Japanese, due to the extent that they still couldn't. But they needed supplies, and they were also go into build some airseals in Western China, and they needed airplane fuel to go cross in Burma into Western China, and the communication lines, were impart to control the pipeline which was being built by US army engineers. Before less could be done, the Burma Road, which was the road essentially through the John Wilson was just a dirt trail housing half ago passable for trucks. The army engineers had to open up that road and now Japanese in that general area, Japanese patrol. Occasionally that was the first time I've had a little experience with combat. We'd run into Japanese patrols, and they were infantry and we have a Signal Corps and they had a lot more equipment than we did, in general. We try to avoid them, and there was some exchanges. I had a bullet wound in my leg. Very superficial bullet wound. But not really heavy combat because the Japanese by that time were signed to retreat in Burma. There was a plan to come go from Burma all the way into India. At one point, when Rommel was being very successful in North Africa, it looked like they might be the Japanese allies, or the Germans might be in the Near East that Rommel would go from Africa into the Near East, and if the Japanese came into India, there wasn't much to stop them from going right across India. Then they would be in the Near East, Afghanistan and was our math adjacent to India.
[00:57:13] Elliot Valenstein: That plan was actually disrupted when the Germans were defeated in North Africa and the Japanese were stopped in their attempt to get into India so that when we met the Japanese, they were partly in retreat. The skirmishes we had with them were just minor skirmishes. They were anxious to get out of there and we weren't anxious to fight with an infantry group that had much heavier equipment than we did. But being in the jungles, working out way into China, that's about 1,000 miles over high mountains, cross rivers, building communication lines, pipelines, and sleeping in the jungles where there were poisonous snakes and spiders and mosquitoes, everyone in our heart. We were just a platoon, which meant that about 40 people. After a while, we didn't look much like the US army. The guys were growing beards, and we didn't have anything that resembles an official uniform. We were just wearing whatever we had. People acquired pets. We had a Himalayan bear as a pet, we had a couple of minor birds which are very good mimics in terms of picking up voices and a couple of rhesus monkeys. Here it is band of guys with nothing resembling an official uniform with a bunch of animals and half the people with beards that looked like a band of Gypsies I think. But we did a lot of working and living in the jungle that way. I think everyone in our outfit had several tropical fevers. I had malaria. Everyone had [inaudible 00:59:18]
[00:59:36] FEMALE_1: Sorry for those technical difficulties. Do you arrive to painting that story about wedding your wife?
[00:59:48] Elliot Valenstein: During the war, while I was in the jungles of Dharma as described earlier. My best friend from high school was in an army program. The acronym for which was ASTP stood for Army Specialized Training Program. It was an interesting program started as soon as we got involved in the war realizing that some technical training would help in the war effort. They sent appropriate people who were just entered the army to schools and they got training in foreign languages, technical fields, engineering, even medicine. My best friend was in one of those programs and I thought that that was a great deal that he had slightly envious. Then I heard that he was killed during the war and what had happened as the war approach the end, they closed down that program, sent all the people in the program, reassign them. He got reassigned into an artillery unit that was in Belgium at a point when the Germans counterattacked. That's the last effort to stop the allied advance and he was killed. When I was discharged from the army, I was anxious to see who, among my other friends were still around and if they had not been killed. So I went to a community center where we used to sometimes hang out and it was there that I met my wife who was acting at that time as an assistant director in that facility. We met and she showed me around the world and one thing led to another. We began to date and hang out. Within a year, we got married. She was in graduate school at the time at Columbia University and I was just starting college having gotten into the army right from high school. One interesting experience which gave me a lot of confidence was that I kept her out late one Friday night and she had an early Saturday morning class. So I told her quite boldly, not knowing what I was in for that I would go and take notes for her. It was a graduate course and I found it quite easy to understand. It wasn't any problem, it wasn't very technical, it was anthropology. It gave me confidence that if this was a graduate course, I can do this stuff at any rate. I finished my undergraduate in about three years or slightly more than three years, going to school in the summer like many veterans who were anxious to make up for lost time. Then my wife and I went to Kansas where I did graduate school work. She held all kinds of various jobs. We used to say that the spouses at that time were putting the husbands will and getting a PhD while they were getting a PhD. My first son was born just before we left Kansas. My first job was at the Walter Reed Institute for Research in Washington DC. My second son was born in Washington. I had acquired a wife and two sons and I was on my way in my professional career.
[01:04:01] FEMALE_1: Do you have any other fun memories of when you and your wife started to date?
[01:04:06] Elliot Valenstein: Well, they were all fun memories.
[01:04:09] FEMALE_1: Correct.
[01:04:10] Elliot Valenstein: Walks and I remember she had a invitation New Year's Eve. This was shortly before we decided to get married. I wasn't a part of that group and I didn't go to that party, but I invited her out the next morning. I said, do you want to take a walk? I'd like to take a walk on New Year's Day. Even though it was early in the morning and there was a lot of snow, we took a long walk and it was romantic, I guess. That was a really fun memory and I think that was about the time I realized that we were probably going to get married. She was willing to walk early New Year's Day after spending late hours on New Year's Eve, so I know she was as serious as it was getting to me.
[01:05:07] FEMALE_1: What about your engagement and wedding?
[01:05:12] Elliot Valenstein: I don't recall that we ever had a formal engagement. We just set a wedding date. I am not at all religious, but my wife's mother had a lot and she decided that she was going to have a big wedding for us and so I went along with that. Being Jewish, she picked out a very fancy synagogue in New York City called the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, which is historical landmark and it's a very interesting synagogue in that it has the center in the middle rather than upfront. At any rate, even though I'm not at all religious, we got married in a very orthodox synagogue picked out only because it was very picturesque. [LAUGHTER]
[01:06:13] FEMALE_1: Anything about the reception you remember?
[01:06:15] Elliot Valenstein: Reception? Yes, we had a reception and tavern and the green, which was a fancy restaurant in Central Park. Since the Rabbi was an orthodoxed Rabbi in this synagogue, he couldn't come to the reception which didn't have appropriately kosher foods, but I was in a daze through the whole thing.
[01:06:49] FEMALE_1: After your second child, what was life like when they were young and where were you living at this time?
[01:06:56] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I bought a house. We were always apartment drawing, so that was a completely new experience to me to live in a house that I owned, that is I owned with a bank. But being an army veteran, I could buy a house on the GI Bill, and it wasn't that bad house. The only thing that was wrong with it was that there were 200 just like it all around it. But the house itself was for first house, quite nice that have three bedrooms and a big family room, a reasonable size amount of land around it.
[01:07:32] FEMALE_1: Where was this?
[01:07:34] Elliot Valenstein: It was in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington DC, and I worked very close at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC. It's interesting that I didn't have to pay anything down because of the GI Bill and my payments which included principal and interests was $89 a month for this house that I just described.
[01:08:05] FEMALE_1: You've gone into working to use quite a bit in the past few videos. What was the typical work day like for you?
[01:08:13] Elliot Valenstein: Well, it was an animal laboratory that I had. So it was a lot of surgery, we operate on animals most brains and then we had designed all kinds of equipment to test various things while we could record electrical activity from the brain or could stimulate different parts of their brain. It was at that time, all research. It wasn't an academic setting, it was a research setting. So I was able to get a lot of work done compared an academic appointment where you're teaching and on committees and supervising students, I was full-time doing research. Being at Walter Reed, a very interesting time I was an army hospital and research that it had a lot of support, especially after the Russians sent up the Sputnik, the little capsule ordered in before we could do anything. So a tremendous amount of money was given to all kinds of science and endeavors and Walter Reed had a huge amount of money. So my research was supported. There were machinists who could build any kind of equipment that I thought I might be able to use. They could buy any equipment that budget was so enriched by the fear of the Russians getting ahead of us in science that literally people would come around and ask if there was any equipment that we needed, that we shouldn't hesitate to order it. Because the worst thing any government bureaucratic agency can do is turn back bunny at the end of the year. There was always an interest and telling us not to waste money, but if there was anything that we needed that would advance our research, we could get it and we get order it. That was a golden opportunity to get a lot of work done with all kinds of support. Not only in terms of equipment but they've got a lot of people there who could build equipment for us, skilled machinists and I had much more support than I ever had afterwards.
[01:10:49] FEMALE_1: Was this the job that took you to the USSR at the time?
[01:10:55] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I guess the sense I was working at Walter Reed when I went to the USSR, which I think made them a little suspicious of me knowing that I was in a nominee hospital. I think I made friends with some of the Russian scientists who told me that the rumor was that I was a spy, because every American at that time was considered to be a potential spy. On the way there, I used the opportunity to visit a lot of countries in Eastern Europe that were under Soviet influence. So I visited Eastern East Berlin and Czechoslovakia, and Poland and got to know a lot about how those people fell under Soviet dominance. This was still during the Cold War and Sterling had died in 1953. This was 1961 when Khrushchev was the prime minister of the Soviet Union and there was a slight easing in the relationship. Very slight but enough so that there was some exchange and I was probably the first person to go to the Soviet Union after World War II for scientists who spent an considerable time. I was there for a better part of a year visiting laboratories.
[01:12:27] FEMALE_1: Did your wife go with you?
[01:12:29] Elliot Valenstein: She came to the last month. My sister took care of our two children. I looked quite young at that time. She also took on the responsibility of selling our house because I had accepted at another position so that when I came back I didn't return to Walter Reed. I returned to the new position that I had accepted. So I went to the Soviet Union when I was in transition between two positions.
[01:13:00] FEMALE_1: Where were you living during your time in Soviet Union?
[01:13:06] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I was in different cities and I put up on hotels.
[01:13:12] FEMALE_1: Still living in hotels for the better part of the year?
[01:13:16] Elliot Valenstein: Yes.
[01:13:16] FEMALE_1: Any outstanding memories you have of you?
[01:13:22] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I visited a lot of scientists and I learned how many of them had been persecuted during the silent period when there was tremendous paranoia and science was terribly handicap during that period, particularly the science that I was doing where I was working on animal behavior. I'm going to Pavlovian ideas. I'm conditioning with a dominant ideas. At the time there were literally purchase a peak of scientists who were considered not to be following the Pavlovian ideas seriously enough and were deviating, Deviationism was almost the accusation that you were deviating from Pavlov was almost like being treasonous in the Soviet Union at that time. Many people lost their jobs. Directors of institutes lost their jobs. I had a chance to talk to all of those people. Many years later I wrote a book about all of these experiences in the Soviet Union and what's been happening in science onto the Stalin period and how much science was handicapped where people got control over the entire feels like a man named Lysenko, who was really an agronomist. Which meant that he did research and agriculture, took control of all of the fields of genetics, which were considered to be very reactionary. Do think that that could be genes that were not influenced by environment and that traits were inherited and protected from the environment by genes to a great extent was considered to be a very reactionary idea and some of their best geneticists were persecuted during the war, while Lysenko was making outrageous claims that by manipulating the environment, he could increase agricultural yield tremendously which turned out to be all false claims but he had to support Stalin at the time and many people were persecuted who we're doing classical genetic. Anyway, I had an opportunity to know what had gone on during that period and there was still some of it going on even while I was there. That whole world was opened up to me. I was politically very liberal all that time, and having that experience in the Soviet Union changed my political views quite a bit.
[01:16:20] FEMALE_1: When you grew up in the Soviet Union, was this when you moved to [inaudible 01:16:24].
[01:16:25] Elliot Valenstein: No, I had a second research to drive. I walked the ring for almost seven years and then a second research job, which was a Yellow Springs, Ohio where Antioch College was. But my research job was at a separate institute just off the campus and efficiently nothing to do with Antioch but they gave me an academic appointment at the College and I taught one course a year. But my main job was doing research full-time. I stayed there 77 years and then I was recruited to come to the University of Michigan in 1970.
[01:17:08] FEMALE_1: Your kids, What did you say spend most of their childhood in Ohio?
[01:17:13] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I spent six years in Washington DC area and then another six or seven years in Ohio. When I came, one was starting high school. You were in high school here, and the other was in middle school.
[01:17:36] FEMALE_1: Do you remember anything you guys would do together as a family?
[01:17:40] Elliot Valenstein: Oh, we took a lot of trips, camping out west, and had many adventures on those trips, slipping and tense and getting a cost stuck up in the Rocky Mountains. When snow descended on us, we just set up a tent and spent the night dug out and wanting and things of that sort.
[01:18:14] FEMALE_1: Let me see. What were your personal favorite things to do?
[01:18:18] Elliot Valenstein: I was very serious about research. I was always putting actual data, and when I was in graduate school, I even played on our team with great delight. We used to be all the fraternity teams. We've caught ourselves the faculty fossils, we weren't really faculty, we were graduate students, but older than the undergraduates and then fraternities that we were applying this or we played in some pretty big stadium. It was just impressive. In high school I had run and track team. I like outdoor activities and athletic trainers.
[01:19:02] FEMALE_1: As you said, you're not very religious, but other any special days events or family traditions you practice that differ from your childhood traditions?
[01:19:10] Elliot Valenstein: Not really. Every once in a while on a blue moon, we would do something like celebrate Hanukkah, light some candles but I never stepped inside a synagogue. After this time I got married, which I just described, except maybe to go when someone else whose children were getting by mitzvot. A colleague of mine, we go as a courtesy.
[01:19:47] FEMALE_1: Do you remember the popular music of your doc or use?
[01:19:51] Elliot Valenstein: I don't think I was ever all of that into music. I think when growing up, it was a big band. Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, swing bands as I recall. I must say that when the Beatles first came around and I thought they were terrible, I said, [LAUGHTER] since grown to like them quite a bit. But I still usually switch to the station when the rap music comes on. I like classical music but I don't consider myself a very serious music listener.
[01:20:34] FEMALE_1: Do you have already popular clothing hairstyles from your doc and use?
[01:20:38] Elliot Valenstein: No, I was never into clothing. [LAUGHTER].
[01:20:42] FEMALE_1: Any slang terms, phrases, or words?
[01:20:44] Elliot Valenstein: No.
[01:20:48] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I'm sure I had some.
[01:20:54] FEMALE_1: Looking back on your working adult life, what important social or historical events were taking place at the time, and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[01:21:12] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I think I was helped quite a bit by Sputnik when the Russian sent that up because my research was funded grandly. Because of that, I grew up. I was in graduate school during the McCarthy period and that was a very scary period where people were really afraid to say what they thought. People were being accused of being communist or communist sympathizers. A lot of people lost their jobs in academia and other places as well. When I went to the Soviet Union, I was interviewed several times beforehand, or at least I was scheduled to be interviewed several times before and they always canceled. I think it was ambivalent about me. This was Army, Defense Security people, the CIA. They routinely, when anyone they knew was going over to the Soviet Union, they would talk to them beforehand and sensitize them to things that they might see. They were more likely to pay attention to these things and then they could be debriefed when they returned home. They weren't asked to be spies in most cases, but they had a clever way of orienting you to things that you might see and therefore pay attention to that you might not otherwise have noticed, and they always would interview when you return. But in my case, because I had a lot of left-wing friends and I went to a lot of so-called "left-wing", indicating in quotes because they weren't all that radical meetings, that my name got on various lists because I'm sure there were informers at that time. I subsequently found out by getting some information about files on me that there were a lot of people at meeting, is a political meetings that I went to, who were obviously taking names and there was in my file notes that I had attended such a meeting. Before I went to the Soviet Union, I never had one of these orientations because they kept canceling them. I'm convinced that they canceled them because they didn't quite know how to cope with me [LAUGHTER] where I stood. The CIA wasn't very sure of me and the Russians weren't very sure of me. One true experience, which tells you a little bit about the paranoia or at the time and also the Soviet inefficiency. Before I went to the Soviet Union, I went down to the Soviet Embassy to get a visa to enter the Soviet Union even though I was going to the Soviet Union on an official exchange program. It was called the Lacy-Zarubin. Zarubin being a Russian, Lacy being someone in the Secretary of State who signed an agreement for one of the first exchange programs that had scientists and also cultural events. Some of the famous Russian ballet performance came to this country around that time as part of an exchange program. I went to out the Soviet Embassy and they said, well, we can't give you a visa so far in advance, like three months. I thought I was being efficient having all that paperwork done. I kept going back, about every two weeks and hey kept saying, it's much too early, it's much too early. Finally, I came down and they said it's much too early and I said I'm about to leave. They I said, but you're not due to being the Soviet Union for about a month. I said yes, but I plan on visiting countries in Europe before going there. He said, well, what country will you'll be in just before you enter the Soviet Union. I said Poland, which was in the Soviet block at that time. They said, well, just go to the Soviet Embassy and the papers will be there waiting for you. I left on a trip to go to the Soviet Union without a visa. [LAUGHTER] I did all my travels around Eastern Europe. When I was in Poland and I told some Polish scientists that I had met before that my visa is supposed to be waiting for me in the Soviet Embassy, can you tell me where it is? This was in Warsaw. They began to laugh. No way will the Russians be efficient enough to have your visa waiting for you. When I went there, not only was my visa not waiting for me, but they never even heard of the exchange program [LAUGHTER] and didn't know anything about it. But they said, don't worry, we'll get in touch with Moscow and we'll have a reply for you. But it took about three weeks before I had to get a reply that I was officially in a program and posted after the Soviet Union. Finally came, but I had to spend three weeks more than I planned in Warsaw, but I was among friends, fellows of the scientist so it wasn't my bad time and I decided to take the train into the Soviet Union. It's long, but at that time about a 20 hour train ride from Warsaw to Moscow. When I crossed the border, the train gauge entering the Soviet Union is wider. They have a wider gauge, then the rest of Europe. The train has to pull into the station. I fell asleep on the train, I didn't realize everyone was supposed to get off the train. I was taken into the train yards where they had to lift up each decoupled caused lift them up and take out the wheels on the track and they were doubled tracks there. You came in a narrow tracks, they took the wheels off while the car was elevated, put higher. I had gotten out and watched through all of this. The Russians were absolutely paranoid about translations. They thought those were military targets. Before I even got to Moscow, the rumor was ahead that I clearly must have been a spy getting off there. There was a Russian woman waiting to receive me when I entered the country, she knew who I was coming. She was very nervous because she wasn't able to do what she was assigned to do because I didn't get off the train at the train station, I was in the train yards alone watching this train changing of the wheels so they could pick the wider track. Finally I pulled back to the train station and she was literally white paint when she finally got to me and gave me some papers. As I said, when I got to the Soviet Union, not only did they think every American was his spine, but I had this additional story which convinced him that I was a spy.
[01:29:44] FEMALE_1: What about memories you have of like the movements of the '60s and '70s, was the Vietnam War to commemorate around that time?
[01:29:55] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I remember the demonstrations. I was a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. At the time we have a lot of demonstrations against the Vietnam War. At that time there was an invasion into Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War and the huge demonstrations which took place every Friday. [LAUGHTER] There were always high-school students who think to throw stones at the police even though it was a college campus. As soon as that happened, then the tear gas would start. The police would put down their big facial shields and it looked like robots marching on onto the students and everyone run in all directions. It was almost like it was choreographed because the same thing happened almost every day. There was a period when people had strong feelings about Vietnam and a lot of people went to Canada to avoid the draft.
[01:31:19] Elliot Valenstein: Strange period which we should never have gotten involved with. Vietnam was French Indochina, a colony of France. France was trying to hold onto it and they weren't able to. We took over because we were afraid that the communists would eventually take over a lot of that part of the world, Southeast Asia but wasn't the war that we had to get involved with and lots of people were killed, and there were strong demonstrations against it.
[01:32:00] FEMALE_1: How old were your children during the Vietnam war?
[01:32:02] Elliot Valenstein: I guess they were high school age.
[01:32:12] FEMALE_1: Were you ever worried about them being dragged into the war?
[01:32:18] Elliot Valenstein: They were still quite young, early high school age.
[01:32:37] FEMALE_1: Here's a good one. Since you worked in a very technological field, were there any major technology changes within the years that you were in reign?
[01:32:49] Elliot Valenstein: Huge, changes, and they're still going on today at such a rapid rate. I can keep up with them. But I remember my training officially was in psychology, but it was on the biological psychology, and I actually did my dissertation with someone in the anatomy department even though my degree was officially in psychology. But most psychologists were interested in behavior and they didn't in any way do anything biological, and I can remember when we first started to learn how to put electrodes into the brains of animals and do surgery. That was really quite remarkable at that time, and people would get up and talk, spent a good part of it talking about the technique of how you drill a hole in the skull and you have to thread something in to provide a way of attaching cables to the electrode that was inserted into the brain, and how to use special equipment so you could accurately placed probes into the brains of animals to just the right target that you want it to. All of that was considered very merry note. Now it's all black Zai, that thing. Even after a few years I was teaching undergraduates in college how to do that in a couple of days they were doing it then themselves feeling very proud that they were doing brain surgery on animals. But now there are probes that you can put in, essentially the photo up the tubes that can turn cells on and off depending upon what color you put in. You can alter the brains of animals so that some of the receptors in the retina that receive light and respond to color can actually put people into brain cells and you can change the activity, either inhibit or excite brain cells by putting in different colors, which you can do through a very confined last tools. I made these techniques that I've advanced during the period when I first started in this field in the late '50s, middle '50s to now, I just have dancing at a tremendous pace.
[01:35:43] FEMALE_1: Last question of today. What do you value most about what you did during the Vietnam war?
[01:35:50] Elliot Valenstein: Oh, it's always exciting, always something new. I've met a lot of friends. I could go to almost any cities by the time that I had become fairly well-known because I had some success in research. I could go to almost any city and I immediately had friends, people who knew of me by having read articles and we had something in common that we could talk about, and they became friends and they would take me around the city and take me to their favorite restaurants and show me around. I felt like I had friends literally all over the world, China and Japan. People from China working in my laboratory. I visited faculty every European country and I have spent time there. I spent time in China. They knew in China that I had been there during World War II, so I was especially treated well because I had helped them during their fight against Japan. The work itself was exciting, always something very new. There were meetings all over the country and all over the world, international meetings. I got to travel a lot and I always attach some free time after the meeting to do visit. Certain work was interesting. The opportunities were tremendous to get to see a lot of the world. Just about everything I liked, and then when I began to teach, I like teaching too. I didn't start teaching until about 15, 16 years after my PhD. I spent that period older and research and came out of my academic work as a full professor. My first full-time academic job. It was unusual in that respect. But all good. What?
[01:38:03] FEMALE_1: [inaudible 01:38:03] Thank you for this [inaudible 01:38:04] interview.
[01:38:06] Elliot Valenstein: Okay. [LAUGHTER].
[01:38:08] FEMALE_1: Thank you so much. Yeah. What will we do. [inaudible 01:38:24]
[01:38:28] FEMALE_1: We're about to begin. If anyone has their cell phones on them, this is the time to turn them off or on silent. Mr. Valenstein, you can call for a break at any point anytime you would like, and you can decline to answer any question. My first introduction is we want to tell your story as one about your experience during the war. This is our focus interview and some of the questions we've asked before. During the first three sessions or asking again because the questions are critical to the story we want to share and it's easier to edit that way. We have about 30 questions to cover.
[01:39:19] Elliot Valenstein: Okay.
[01:39:20] FEMALE_1: The first set of questions relate to your early life decision to [inaudible 01:39:23] . My first question is, where did you grow up?
[01:39:28] Elliot Valenstein: I grew up in New York City, in Manhattan, the upper part of Manhattan Island. I think I may have mentioned that it's at the time that I was growing up that was very unusual. People think of Manhattan as being all paved. There was a lot of green space and some of it quite wild that we used to wander through and find what we thought were Indian arrowheads. It was very much unlike what people think growing up in New York City and living in a hotel, living inside of a middle-class neighborhood which had a lot of green space right alongside the Hudson River. That's the answer to the question.
[01:40:12] FEMALE_1: Where did you go to high school.
[01:40:14] Elliot Valenstein: I went to George Washington High School, which is in that general area of Manhattan. I was reading, just the other day, that a classmate of mine was Henry Kissinger, who I never met [LAUGHTER].
[01:40:29] FEMALE_1: Where were you when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and how did this personally affect you?
[01:40:34] Elliot Valenstein: Oh, well, it soon affected me because I went into the army shortly afterwards. Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, 1941. I was graduating high-school mid year. Just a few weeks later, I turned 18 on the 9th, two days after Pearl Harbor and I enlisted two weeks later.
[01:41:02] FEMALE_1: Why did you decide to enlist after graduation? Had you always know you wanted to join the army.
[01:41:07] Elliot Valenstein: No, I didn't plan on training the army at all. I didn't plan on Pearl Harbor. I wasn't even thinking about the army, but it was a combination of things, I guess. I wasn't sure. Floating around in high school a lot exactly what I wanted to do next. There was a certain amount of patriotism, which is hard for young people to appreciate these days because it was pretty clear cut who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. It's a lot more complicated these days in terms of the military. There was a draft on, in fact the draft started even before Pearl Harbor. There was a draft is not about preparation and an anticipation of difficulties. I would have been drafted anyway, so I enlisted as I said.
[01:42:03] FEMALE_1: What was your parents reaction to your enlistment?
[01:42:07] Elliot Valenstein: Yes. That question was asked to me before and I never really thought about it. But it wasn't, as I might have anticipated. I would've thought they would be very much against it and so on. But everyone was going into the army than either being drafted or volunteering. I think they just accepted it in retrospect that, they were pretty protective parents. Yet they just accepted it as inevitable at that time.
[01:42:42] FEMALE_1: Next to the questions relate to your experiences in the military. Where was the first place you trained?
[01:42:49] Elliot Valenstein: Well, first place is called an induction center. Where you get in and you get a uniform and exposure to a lot of films and give you many shots, sometimes a shot simultaneously at each arm. It was so many that we had to take and when I had enlisted, I enlisted in a program that put me into [inaudible 01:43:12] . You'll also take any deductions center a lot of tests. For some reason probably based partly on the test results and partly upon what the army needed at that moment, they decided that I should be trained as a cryptographer to put things into cold and bright red codes and so on. I was shipped to a signal camp, Camp Crowder in Missouri, where I have the basic training which is firing guns and going on long matches with heavy packs and climbing over obstacle courses and stuff like that. But I was very athletic, so that was a piece of cake, all that stuff. I wasn't one of those old 30-year-old guys who [LAUGHTER] couldn't make it over the barriers we had to climb. After basic training, which lasted three weeks, I started cryptography school, which was divided into two parts. The first part was basic stuff. The second part required a security clearance. If you came from a big city like I did in New York City, it took a long time to get a security clearance because you're living in an apartment house with a great number of people and be almost anonymous while those who came from a small town. They'd asked the principal of the school and a local minister, and they had a security clearance. I was just hanging around picking up cigarette butts. In the army was called policing the area and waiting for my security clearance when suddenly my name was posted to get ready to be shipped out. What had happened? The battalion that I eventually joined, had lost about 900 men on a ship that was sunk in the Mediterranean when they were on their way to India. I was mobilized to join that group and so on. Before I knew it, I was in an embarkation center in California and on my way to India. I think that's enough for now [LAUGHTER].
[01:45:32] FEMALE_1: Quick question about your code training. Did you have the opportunity to work with Navajo Code Talkers?
[01:45:39] Elliot Valenstein: No, not at all. Didn't even know they existed until much later. The first part was working with machines that when you're put in a code for the day, any message in plain English was put into a scrambled set of letters that the machine could unscramble if the code for the day was put in. It wasn't very sophisticated or even a good code, but it was something that could last for a day. It could be used on battle lines, and it would be sufficient for a few hours anyway.
[01:46:22] FEMALE_1: You also explained that your basic training was about three weeks, but how long was your code training?
[01:46:28] Elliot Valenstein: I don't recall exactly, but the early pot was probably maybe five to six weeks or something like that. Then we had actually pseudo maneuvers where we went out and we had fed battle lines and I would be getting messages and I would have to put them into English and tell them to send them up to command. I guess that was part of the training, but the actual classroom training was probably around five weeks.
[01:47:06] FEMALE_1: You said that you are policing the area waiting for your security clearance. About how long was that while you were waiting?
[01:47:13] Elliot Valenstein: It was fairly long. It could have been a month.
[01:47:21] FEMALE_1: Did you have any close friends in the army?
[01:47:25] Elliot Valenstein: Not at that time. No.
[01:47:31] Elliot Valenstein: People get put together from all over the country, and we made friends, but I wouldn't quote close friends at that time. We kept moving around from unit to unit and so on.
[01:47:44] FEMALE_1: In past interviews, you explained to us that before you arrived in India, you were in Australia?
[01:47:51] Elliot Valenstein: Yes. I was put on a ship and rather than going with a convoy, it was a luxury liner, but it was certainly not a luxury liner. It hadn't been converted to a troop transport, and we were living in hammocks that were five high and rather very unpleasant. Because a lot of people got so sick , and the people on the hammocks were bathing the people below with vomit. But we stopped for refueling in Australia, and it was a funny story in a way, because when we landed, we were the first American troops that had landed in Australia. It was right after enabled battle that actually prevented the Japanese from invading Australia, which they had planned to do in the evening was some Japanese landing parties that had landed in Northern Australia, so when we landed and right after the US Navy had it's hard to call it a naval victory because there were a lot of Japanese and American ships that were sung, but it was enough to prevent them from invading Australia. We were treated for their 24 hours in Australia as heroes. Something we certainly didn't deserve and people were extremely nice and I'm just dragging us into their homes, the fetus and so on.
[01:49:28] FEMALE_1: What did you and your unit completed in Burma?
[01:49:33] Elliot Valenstein: We are building telephone communication lines through the jungles of Northern Burma, which is a pretty wild country into China. In China, they were engineering groups building airbases that we're going to be used to bomb Japan when some planes that were still in production, they would call B29s and referred to as the super fluctuates bombers would look very small now, against a commercial jet airliner. These were propeller planes still, but they were quite large for their time and they were in production. They had a long range and could bomb Japan from Western China. The Japanese had occupied almost all of the coastal cities in China and this was for our western part. It actually did amount to much in terms of winning the war because although the basis were used a couple of times to bomb Japan, all these plans were moved to the South Pacific Islands when they were retaken and they were closer to Japan.
[01:50:45] FEMALE_1: Did you ever face any direct combat?
[01:50:49] Elliot Valenstein: Yes, but nothing like D-Day invasions, mainly meeting up with Japanese patrols and exchange and fire. Since we went not an entrance you glue, we were very glad not to meet them too often. At that time they were in retreat, so they were probably also happy to get on with it, but they were infantry and they had weapons that we didn't have, we only had rifles.
[01:51:19] FEMALE_1: Did you ever fire a weapon in there?
[01:51:21] Elliot Valenstein: Yes. I did.
[01:51:24] FEMALE_1: What was your time like in the jungle? What types of animals did you encounter?
[01:51:29] Elliot Valenstein: Just about every animal that exists in Asia. There were tigers, not that frequently, but we did see some lot of smaller animals, there were a lot of very poisonous snakes, all kinds of little insects. Just about everyone in my unit got one or two tropical diseases. I got malaria and a couple of others.
[01:51:57] FEMALE_1: How did your unit interact with these animals?
[01:52:02] Elliot Valenstein: I don't know if I'd call it interaction, although in terms of the wild animals, once or twice we went hunting, but mostly we try to avoid them. Certainly we're aware of poisonous snakes and a lot of the large cat like animals came out mostly at night. But we were living in the jungles and we picked up all kinds of pets where you had functioning as a platoon, which is about 30-40 men and pretty much isolation. But living in the jungle, we picked up all pets and I have some pictures that I brought along thinking you wanted them today of holding monkeys and small bears. Himalayan bears. Part of Burma is in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. They were small bears and we looked pretty much like a Gypsy band because no one wore anything in the jungles that resembles a uniform and people who have gotten beards. We had all of these animals that for pets that we were traveling with, what we were strange looking group.
[01:53:31] FEMALE_1: Did your food supplies ever run out and what would you do when they did?
[01:53:36] Elliot Valenstein: We never went hungry for food, but a lot of it was dropped in by planes. We traded sometimes when we can request natives who had chickens and hens, we traded cigarettes for eggs, which we boiled in our helmets, you can do that. [LAUGHTER]
[01:54:01] FEMALE_1: What did you do with your unit to recognize holidays and national celebrations?
[01:54:08] Elliot Valenstein: You make it sound like a picnic. [LAUGHTER] I don't think we celebrated very many holidays, I think we're all aware of and maybe Christmas or something. I can't remember, Christmas rebuild some fires in the jungle. One Christmas, there was an earthquake in the middle of the jungle. But I can't recall any special holiday celebrations.
[01:54:40] FEMALE_1: When did your units run out of FDR's debt and did that affect the morality?
[01:54:46] Elliot Valenstein: Well, that was pretty near the end of the war. We were so deep in the jungles, I think we heard it by two days later. It probably is a surprise to you, the group I was in was from all over the United States. There were Montana ranches and Texas cowboys at carried her good all the way through the war in the jungles. Not everyone was a Democrat in favor of Roosevelt. Much to my surprise, coming from New York City, where are you could walk down the streets. This is before I went into the army, he could walk down the streets whenever Roosevelt was giving one of his fireside torques. One everyone had radios on or you can walk down the streets and hear the whole speech just coming out of people's radios in the apartment building. But in the army there were people who actually said to him or gland.
[01:55:53] FEMALE_1: By the time you reached China, could you tell the Allies were willing?
[01:56:00] Elliot Valenstein: Wasn't very clear, we didn't get news all that much. D-Day was relatively late. D-Day occurred, and 44, and I went in the army, 42 shortly after the Pearl Harbor. Until we invaded Europe, and it was clear that the landing was going to last and that way we're going to advance. It wasn't clear what we're winning the war. It took pretty close to the end before I think we were aware that the war was end. We were taking back some islands from Japan, but we're a long way from defeating Japan.
[01:56:58] FEMALE_1: When you reach China, what did you do?
[01:57:01] Elliot Valenstein: Much the same we were building communication lines and so much the same responsibilities, and so are different people. In Burma, we were saying actually, there must be 20-30 different tribal groups in Burma at that time. Some of them were living in the Stone Age in China was very different.
[01:57:30] FEMALE_1: When did you find out the war was over and did you learn right away about the atomic bomb being dropped?
[01:57:38] Elliot Valenstein: Probably not. Again, for a couple of days and had no notion of what the atomic bomb even meant and then what we did here, that the war was over, we had to work our way back all the way from China and through all the way across Burma, we're talking about 1,000 miles and trucks over roads that were barely impossible because the jungle itself grows so fast that it closes in unless it's constantly maintained, these dirt roads just become closed in so we had our work our way all the way back into India and which we did. But it took us probably a month to get back and finally get into Calcutta, where we were to wait for ships that were to take us back to the States.
[01:58:40] FEMALE_1: What did you do while waiting for the ships back to the States?
[01:58:43] Elliot Valenstein: Most of us were assigned to do some things, the US Army had a tremendous amount of supplies all over the place and they were keeping some records of them. Unlike in the jungle where we throw everything away that we didn't need so we didn't have to carry it back in Calcutta. There were warehouses. I got assigned to some warehouse where we get some records of the material was there. It took a long time before I got home because there were hundreds of thousands of troops all over the world that were brought over there gradually during the course of the war and when the war ended suddenly there were enough ships to take everyone home all at once. I think I was there in Calcutta. Maybe the war ended in Japan in August of '45 and I think I got home until something like September, or October, probably October that fall, so I was waiting a couple of months before the ship became available and I got home.
[01:59:59] FEMALE_1: You can decline to answer this question but we were just wondering did you lose anyone according to you in the war?
[02:00:05] Elliot Valenstein: Yes, lost a couple of people in my battalion who were by this time close friends. We were living together, sleeping in tents for a couple of years. But I also heard word in my closest friend from high school, someone who is on attracting women members killed in Europe. I think I mentioned to you, there was a program which sounded like a great deal and for many people it was called the Army Specialized Training Program, ASDP, which essentially sent people to college that someone in the government decided that if people seem to be bright enough, we would always have a need for people with more training and somewhat trained as engineers somewhere would go blind and it was mostly undergraduate training, a pre-med schools and this good friend of mine was sent to Harvard where he had this deal while I was in the jungles we were commuting taking sound. When it looked like we were going to win the war when we advanced enough in Europe. If they're invading Europe, they close that program down just suddenly and everyone was assigned some place else and he was sent to Europe and joined into G group. It was at the time that the Germans had this counter offensive even though they were losing reward, they tried one last attempt as a counter offensive. It's called the Battle of Belgium Bulge and it was effective for quite awhile and he was killed. He's taken out of school where he had this great deal and that's the way the army was. Things happened just with a great deal of unpredictability where you've got assigned and when you survived was just luck.
[02:02:07] FEMALE_1: We've also got questions relating to you return home after serving in the military. What was it like to reunite with your family?
[02:02:15] Elliot Valenstein: Always very warm and I can remember coming home with a big pack on my back and getting lots of hugs and kisses and my father taking a secret look to see what ribbons I had on my uniform. After a few days, I began to look around the neighborhood to see who of my friends were still around and explore and after that I went to a community center where I met my wife who was an assistant to the director and my wife to be. I was very much in a hurry even though I fooled around in high-school quite a bit. I resigned track team and I read a lot I think I was pretty broadly educated, but I never did my homework or almost never did my homework. But when I came back from Miami, I really went through an education I was anxious and ready and so I enrolled in college and started that career.
[02:03:27] FEMALE_1: What did you do immediately when you returned home from war? Was it difficult to transition from the army to daily life?
[02:03:35] Elliot Valenstein: Not really, I had been together with this platoon so long. [LAUGHTER] I couldn't believe that I wasn't going to see them [LAUGHTER] again and as I mentioned, they came from all over the country. None from Manhattan side, of course, I didn't see any of them and that felt strange, but I didn't have an adjustment problem as we read about today with a difficult adjustment problems it so does that happen.
[02:04:11] FEMALE_1: How does your chime in new world change your views about life?
[02:04:15] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I got to be serious about getting an education and wanting to do something and thinking ahead of a possible career. Although I hadn't picked the field, I would eventually enter. I knew I wanted an education and fooling around in high school, but when I got started to college I don't think I got anything but A's and hardly came up the air until I had my PhD and I was starting as a freshman college and college was very special at that time because there were many people like me, very much like me in the sense of wanting to make up for lost time and were serious and yet we were older and had a lot of experiences under our belt and so school was, I think, quite different because we were 22 not 18, re-entered college and as I said, we had a lot of experiences and we were anxious to get on with our life and so it was very special.
[02:05:24] FEMALE_1: Last question. What lessons from the army do you still carry with you today?
[02:05:30] Elliot Valenstein: Well, I would say I learned to respect a lot of people with very different kinds of backgrounds. We had coal miners from West Virginia and as I said, ranches from Montana and loud mouth Texans [LAUGHTER] and everyone had something to offer. Even people I dislike because of their political views seem so bang with to me. When we needed something to be done, sophisticated guys who came from Manhattan usually couldn't do it, but some ranch or from Montana could get to the generator and fix it. He didn't know any physics or fancy electronics, but he knew how to tinker around, fix that because a living the way they did, they were very much dependent upon themselves and so I learned to respect all kinds of people and I think I've retained that to this day that's how anyone who can't learn something from. But in terms of what I eventually ended up doing, the skills I acquired in the army were not applicable at all.
[02:06:58] FEMALE_1: Thank you.
[02:06:59] Elliot Valenstein: Sounds like we're finished.
[02:07:00] FEMALE_1: Yeah.
[02:07:00] Elliot Valenstein: Were there any questions?

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2022

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