Interviews: Chris Driggs | Phillip Earl | Ann Howard | Bob Kent | Elizabeth Raymond | Guy Rocha

Bob Kent
Son of Ira Kent (Read Ira's Wartime Letters)

Q: I want to talk about your dad and your dad’s experience during WWI. Now did he talk to you during that experience? What are some of the stories you remember?

BK: He talked quite a bit about it when we were getting ready to go into the service in the early ‘40’s because just twenty years before he had been in WWI. He mentioned at that time that he was fighting a war to end all wars and here it is twenty years later another war with Germany had started and he was concerned with our wellbeing. And he wanted the three children he had to stay out of the infantry because he wasn’t too impressed with the experience he had in France and Germany in 1917 and 1918. So he wanted us to get in some other part of the fighting that did not entail hand to hand combat on the battlefield.

Q: You said your father based on his experiences hoped that you guys had an easier time. So what were some of those experiences?

BK: Well, he went over there in the late summer and they were moved around France until the first part of October. I think it was October 10th when he said they went over the top. And he was excited about that because there was quite a bit of patriotism in those days. Everybody went over there to see what they could do to control the German onslaught. So he went into great detail telling us about his experiences the first day. He remembered how he went out into the trenches and into no-man’s land which was completely entangled with barbed wire and stuff like that; and how he got through the barbed wire and how the Germans were actually retreating and getting themselves up and when they saw all these new Yankee soldiers and they came out of their dugouts and threw their hands up and yelled “comrade!”

Q: So his first day on the job in battle was a good day.

BK: Well, it was pretty gruesome really because there were a lot of dead soldiers and dead Germans. And he mentioned how he went through their packs to see what they were carrying. I guess they were looking for food and souvenirs and stuff like that. How the Germans when they retreated had left a lot of booby-traps where they had hoped to surprise some Yankee soldier and get ‘em killed. He told how he came upon two bayonets that were stuck in the ground and behind the bayonets was a little wire going into the ground. He didn’t have time to look and see what it was but he was sure it was some kind of booby-trap that if he pulled these bayonets out to take as souvenirs or anything like that they would have exploded and killed him so he was very careful about that. He also mentioned about when some of these when a big group of these German soldiers had given up they went into the dug out to see if anyone else was in there and they found this basket of food that was covered with a cloth and they took the cloth off and they found that it was some German officers lunch or rations for that day and they called some of their comrades over and they went and looked at it and decided they would partake in it. It had wine in it and bread and butter all those things they had been missing for so many days because on the battle field they just had ration of this hard tack they called it and then they had canned beef, bully beef they called that. And they sat down and really had a feast on a German officer’s ration. Because of course the Germans were right there next to Germany so they ate naturally a lot better than the Americans did.

Q: Was there any sort of change in his letters, in tone, from when he first got there to when he was about to come home?

BK: Oh yeah, of course. That first battle was something he was real excited about and as time went on there were numerous battles almost continuously until the war was over. You could tell he was more experienced in protecting himself and the ways of the experienced artillery person would be because the infantry was out there all by themselves and exposed to all kinds of hazards, machine guns, and artillery shells. And he told about the different comrades that he was next to that got shot in the head and got their legs blown off. It was really quite an experience for him.

Q: Did he talk about what regular life in the trench was like?

BK: Oh yeah. It’s really bad because it was in the late fall and I guess the weather over there was quite wet, it rains almost every day. And you can imagine what it would be like living in just a hole. Because they were advancing on these Germans and they had to just dig their hole’s and get in them because the Germans had their regular bunkers and stuff like that that they had built over a period of time. So they had never took their clothes off and they just had a blanket to sleep with. And they stayed out there as much as a couple of weeks at a time. But fortunately it didn’t last that long because the Germans were in retreat and some of the battles weren’t as severe as when it first started.

Q: Now your dad was older than most of the guys going over. He probably could have gotten an exemption so why did he feel he had to go?

BK: Well, I don’t know if he could have gotten an exemption or not. There was you know the war started with the United States declaring war in April in 1917 and they immediately started the draft and 400 people in Churchill county were eligible to go over sea’s you know that was the age from 18-30. He didn’t try to get an exemption, he just let things naturally take place and what happened was they had drawings from the 400 people that were registered and he was unfortunate enough to be the 22 person to be drawn from the hat. So he had to make up his mind really fast. So he went ahead and volunteered for the army and went down to Los Angeles in August of 1917 and then he went up to Fort Lewis right after that for basic training.

Q: He tried to pick his service instead of being thrown in wherever.

BK: Well, he tried to get out of the infantry but it didn’t work apparently. He wanted to get into quartermaster because he had had a lot of experience in retailing because he was in his father’s general merchandising from 1914 until he enlisted in 1917. He tried to get into that but it didn’t work out I guess they needed more infantry people and everybody wanted to get out of the battlefield I guess.

Q: Do you know when he got sent off if they were sent in groups?

BK: They took them in groups of about 20 people. Whenever a group of these draftees were sent off to boot camp they’d have a big parade. They’d start at the high school and they’d have the high school band, city band, which they had in those days. They’d decorate cars and things like that and they’d have a big parade from the high school down to the railroad depot where everyone traveled by train in those days and they would leave by train. People were trying to give them as big a send off as they could.

Q: How about when they came back?

BK: Well, they got back straggled you know and so there would only be one or two come back at a time but I guess they had quite a bit of celebration you know in November when the war was over. Of course he was over there and he stayed on Border Patrol until he didn’t get back here until April 1919 so he was over there three or four months after the war ended.

Q: Do you think serving or being in the war had an impact on him?

BK: Oh yeah. He was kind of sickly after that. He could get colds. And whether this pleurisy that he got over there in the trenches related to his medical problems I don’t know because they smoked a lot of cigarettes in those days too you know. Those little short one’s with a lot of nicotine in them. And he always had problems, he was in the hospital on three or four different occasions and he died when he was 59 so he left pretty early.

Q: Based on what your experiences in the military, what kind of impact do you get from reading those letters he wrote?

BK: Well, when I was in the service I didn’t have any experiences like that really. I was sea going on the ship. We had numerous battles but not on a one to one basis like it would be if you were in the infantry or some of the experiences some other people in WWII had. It was really graphic the way he describes the way people were killed along side him and shooting other people, although though he didn’t say well he did say he thought he actually did shoot several people but everybody was shooting at the same guy. It’s bad when you’re on a one to one basis like that.

Q: He really wrote with a lot of detail. Was he telling too much?

BK: Well, I think he was concerned about, he didn’t want his children to experience the things he did during the war. It changed his whole life there’s no question about that.

Q: For Fallon what was the impact?

BK: Oh, I think it impacted it greatly because economically it was a big boom for the farmers of the area. They just came out of quite a severe depression in 1913 and 1914 and then the war was declared over in Europe. In 1914 the prices of all the commodities that the farmers produced went way up in value like alfalfa hay went up from $3 or $4 a ton in 1914, up to $16 or $17 a ton in 1918 so you can see that the war had a big impact but not only that but it took all those people out of the community. There was like 400 men that were registered for the draft not that all of them were called, there were exemptions for farming and things like that. But a great number of them went from this community. And they also, each community had to buy so many liberty bonds which was used to finance the war and each area had a quota and Fallon was one of the first communities in the state to meet their quota and I think they met that in June of 1917. So you can see that they were very patriotic people around here. I guess they were all over the United States.

Q: When did he get back?

BK: He didn’t get back, well he landed in New York on April 1, 1919 and he requested that he be discharged from the army at the Presidio down in San Francisco which they did so he was back in Fallon before the end of April.

Q: I know that there was the outbreak of influenza in 1919, do you remember stories about it?

BK: Yeah he mentioned influenza in some of his letters but it must have started before he got back because he didn’t mention it after he got back. So I don’t know exactly when that was.

Q: So he was talking about influenza over in Europe?

BK: Oh yeah they had it over there. But they also had it in the United States because I know his mother and father got real sick with it. He commented on it in several of his letters that he wanted to know how everyone was and if they got over the influenza or not. In those days it was real serious, they didn’t have any vaccination for it or anything. It just had to run it’s course.

Q: So your grandparents had it?

BK: Oh yeah it was very contagious. I suppose most of the community had it at one point or another.

Q: How did Fallon deal with influenza?

BK: It was quite severe. Judging from his letters, they said that almost everyone got it eventually.

Q: Can you tell me more about the prosperous time for Fallon?

BK: Like I said before 1913, 1914 was the big depression and then when the war was declared over in Europe the commodities prices started going up. The United States was shipping a lot of foodstuffs over to Europe before they actually got into the war. They were shipping a lot of meat and stuff like that and Churchill County raised a lot of alfalfa and small grains and they were feeding cattle in here to promote the war. The price of hay went from like $3 or $4 a ton clear up to $18/ $19 a ton in a four or five-year period during the war was taking place. So the farmers really prospered during that time.

Q: Can you tell me about the Fallon sugar beet factory?

BK: What happened was in 1909 the farmers like I say were having a hard time finding a crop that would bring in cash so that they could pay their irrigation bills so that they could pay off their food supplies at their different merchants and so forth. So the merchants and some of the prominent farmers in the area formed this group called the Commercial Club and their main duty was to see if they could attract somebody to come into the community and build a sugarbeat factory. So a group of this Commercial Club went down to southern California and contacted this company called Case and Heinz Company who had two sugarbeat factories down there in southern California. So they talk to them about the possibility of building a plant in Churchill County. So in late 1909 the people came up to Fallon and talked to a lot farmers and they got really interested because one of the things that had happened in California and Utah was when they started raising sugarbeats the irrigated farmland went all the way from $50/acre to $500/ acre so if they could successfully grow Sugarbeats in this area they felt that the homesteaders would be able to get a lot more money for their land if they decided to sell it. So they were successful in getting this Case and Heinz interested in the area and they started the Nevada Sugar Company and they sold a lot of stock locally and also to people who had money in other areas and they had bank loans and stuff and they were successful in raising about $700,000 worth of capital which they thought it would take to build the plant. So they started building this plant and the farmers in 1910 planted 7,000 acres of irrigated land in Sugarbeat production and everything was going real good at that time and by September/ October was real good. Looked good and everything. And it got some disease called curly top and the beats stopped growing and a lot of them died in the field and it was just a real disaster. In the mean time they had already built the plant and the plant was just standing by ready to process the harvest of the sugar beat. It was just devastating for the people invested in the plant and also for the farmers who had invested a lot of money in weeding and thinning the beats and it was a high expense crop to raise. And so when they finished processing the production in 1910 or 1911, early 1911 they only produced 7,000 sacks of sugar and it was normal for them to produce maybe like 10 times that for a good crop. Because a sugarbeat factory was designed to process 10,000 acres of sugarbeats at 40 ton per acre and the crop was just a mere trifle of that. So the next year they went out and they had a lot of difficulty trying to get people raising beats again but they did get a different variety of seed and they thought maybe that would correct a lot of the diseases that the beats had the first year. But they only got 2,000 acres signed up but when they harvested the crop they still got the curly top but it wasn’t near as bad. That year off of 2,000 acres they got 15,000 hundred pound sacks of sugar so that was a lot better that was like 750 pound bags of sugar per acre versus the hundred pound of sugar they got the first year. But the investors of the company were very discouraged; they wanted to get out. They wanted to move the plant down to California someplace so a group of people from here, the business men and farmers went back to Michigan where a lot of the money had been raised and they talked them into giving them one more year. So they went the next year and it was very similar to the two presiding years although they did do a lot better they still lost money but in the mean time the price of sugar was going up on account of the war and see that would have been 1913 and 1914 so they did better but the Nevada Sugar Company declared bankruptcy and the Sugarbeat factory was sold at a share of say I think it was in January of 1916 and at that time a local banker called George Wingfield was very prominent in the mining business and he came to Reno from Tonopah and he bought the factory for 245,000 at this sheriffs sale which was a loss of some half million dollars to the original stockholder. So he decided he would try to run the plant another year which was 1916 which the price of sugar had really gone up on account of the war. And so he talked a lot of people in to planting the beats and that year was also a failure and they lost money on the thing so the factory was closed until 1917 and it remained closed for the next ten year and in 1927 it was sold to a bunch of local investors it was I.H Kent and R.L Douglas and E.F. Burney and then this George Wingfield was still interested in it. And they went out and tried to get the farmers to plant the beats and they were very successful. They got a lot of acreage out of Churchill County and even up into the Truckee Meadows and they planted there and Fernley and Yerrington and they even went as far as Susanville and Alturas and got people to plant beats. They had this new variety of seed which they thought would be much more resistant to this curly top disease which was happened to the beats because of this leaf hopper that lived in this pig weed which is a very common weed in the valley which grows on the rag weed plants that are on the borders of almost every field . . . Anyway getting back to the 1927 harvest. They had a real good year. They, the farmers did better. I think between 20-30 tons per acre. And the sugarbeat factory produced over 40,000 hundred pound sacks of sugar. What happened was in 1927 the great depression started and the price of sugar dropped almost 50% so they were doomed again and the plant lost money and the farmers didn’t do too well either because the farmers proceeds were based on the amount the company sold the sugar for so the factory was permanently closed down. A year or so later was sold to a junk leader in San Francisco and it remained closed until 1934. But during that time it was prohibition you know and the some enterprising people from out of town realized they could make moonshine from the left over residue that was left in the plant from the production of sugar. So they were making quite a profit until federal agents closed it down.