Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with

Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Charles M. Slaton, CMC, USN (Ret.) conducted on March 28, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: Let's start by telling me something briefly about your background. I'm interested in

where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and just any of these pieces that might suggest how it was that you ended up in Antarctica.

CS: Well, it's a long trail, but I started out as a little farm boy on a sharecropping farm in

Alabama. I was born in Georgia, but when I was a year old I wound up in Alabama through my parents' divorce and that. And I did that till I was eight or nine, maybe ten years old, and I thought, well, I can do better than this some other place, so I left.

DOB: By yourself. CS: By myself, and I piddled along for I suppose it might've been about a year, and I wound

up in Georgia where I knew that my dad lived somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia. I worked for other farmers and I milked cows and plowed cotton and whatever it took to make forty or fifty cents so I could go a little further, and they always fed me.

I wound up in Atlanta, Georgia, and one way or the other, why I found my father. Well, he and I didn't hit it off too well together, so I wound up living with my grandmother out at Brookhaven, Georgia. And we moved from Brookhaven, Georgia, to Hialeah, Florida, in 1929 it seems to me because there was a terrible hurricane right after we got there, and I think that was in '29. And then I lived with my grandmother and I did paper routes and odd jobs for folks and whatever I could make a dollar at and went to school as much as I could, and wound up getting a job—I was working for a master plumber doing some little painting maintenance and yard work and that for him. He didn't have a son.

In those days about the only way you could get in the plumbing game was to have a parent that was a master plumber. So he didn't have a son, and he asked me if I would like to be a plumber. And I was a little past twelve years old, and I started in working as an apprentice plumber in his shop. When I was seventeen, I was the youngest person in Dade County, Florida, in those days that was ever admitted to the union, which the number of I've forgotten these days, but it was Dade County, Florida, and I was the youngest person that had got a journeyman license in Dade County, Florida, at that time.

I was pretty good at plumbing, but my main thing was wiping lead, which is a lost art these days, but in those days all your toilet fixtures had to be wiped on a lead—the lead stub had to come out of cast iron and then you wiped a flange to it and mounted the water closet to that. All sink arms had to be lead and so you had to wipe fittings to the lead that could be caulked into cast iron.

And then about the last year before I got my license, I worked on Miami Beach on a big building, a big mansion, and all the plumbing was lead. Sewer, water, and everything was lead, so you had to wipe all those joints. Well, they imported a guy from New York,

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 2

who was a Scotchman and knew lead inside out, and I finished getting my education on wiping lead with him.

So when I went to take my test, they had a little written thing, but they were more interested in what you could do. So the first thing that I had to do was to show them that I could wipe a lead joint. They took a twelve-inch piece of lead pipe, 4"x12", and a brass flange to go on one end of it, and you had to wipe that joint. And the thing that they had it on was a small 6"x10" box with rounded-out ends to hold it in place, and you had to wipe it in place without moving it.

I wiped the joint and got it finished. There was a man about eighty years old was the head of the board. He said, "Let me see that thing, son." There was about six guys on the board that were doing this examining; he was the head of it. So I handed it up to him, and he looked at it. You had to have it in rags because it was still pretty hot. He looked at it as it was cooling, and pretty soon he took it and he wiped it alongside his cheek like that, and it didn't pull a hair on his cheek, I guess. He laid it back down and he said, "Well, gentlemen, anybody that can wipe lead like that don't need to go any further with this test. You're a journeyman plumber, son."

DOB: Oh, how fantastic. You must have been very proud. CS: So then I worked at plumbing for about a year after that, and by then we're into 1936, and

I went down and signed up to join the Navy. DOB: Why? CS: Well, I didn't really know anything about the Navy, but I just heard it was a good place

that you could learn a trade, another trade, you know, so I thought that's good enough for me. So I went in the Navy, and I wound up in the shipfitter gang on the USS Maryland. In July, I think, of '36 we got a troop transport to the West Coast. I rode a troop transport around through Panama and up to Long Beach and then got off and got on the Maryland, which was BB-46. And I was on her till July of 1939.

In the meantime I got married in July of 1938, and then in July of 1939, I had about three-and-a-half years in the Navy by then and my kiddie cruise was up, so I went out of the Navy and I went back to Florida and went back into plumbing.

Well, I worked at that until the war started, and December the 8th I'm down on the recruiter's steps and I want back in the Navy. I got back in the Navy; I had various experiences.

I first went up to Jacksonville and helped put the Newport Naval Air Station in commission, which they had just pumped out of the little slough there and made a turning basin for aircraft carriers, and still a lot of everglades and a lot of swamps there. You


had to be careful where you walked. So anyway, I helped put that station in commission and helped lay the ground field for the rhombic antennas which had to be grounded. I welded the cables together and that made the grid about an acre or so, and then it was covered up and then the antennas went up. That was the ground for them.

DOB: I know you had incredible experiences during the war as a diver and all kinds of things. CS: Then I left Jacksonville. Well, I think one of the reasons that I got to go where I did

was they were rebuilding some old steam engines, reciprocating engines, and there was bearings on the thing and nobody knew how to wipe those bearings. They had about twelve or fifteen bearings there, and they was trying to find somebody in town, some shop that could do them, and I said, "You don't need anyone. I can do those things." "Oh, you don't know how to mix babbitt and lead, etc. to make a bearing." I said, "I can do that thing. Let me do one for you."

So I set up the things and I wiped one bearing for them, and they did all their testing on it, and they said, "Well, yes, that's probably better than we've ever had before." So I wiped all their bearings for them and scraped them and that and helped them fit them to the crankshaft. They said that was pretty good.

They had something up in South Brooklyn, New York in the receiving ship there. They had some problems with putting gun mounts in buses and taking them out to these armed guards that were on merchant ships. But they were having trouble with their mounts getting them put in the things so they were secure, you know. I went up there and worked on that, and we finally figured out a solution and got them so that they could get them out to the ships. I don't think I had that much to do with it, but anyway, I was a work hand. So anyway, we took them out to the ships and trained those people in how to use and maintain forty- and fifty-millimeter guns. We even had a five-inch mount mounted like their guns for training.

But anyway, then we got that thing done, and by then I was wanting to get to the West Coast because I wanted to get back on a ship. That's what I wanted. Well, I wound up in Bremerton, Washington, and they assigned me to the USS Pyro, which was an ammunition ship they were putting back in commission. I thought man, I am dead now.

So I run across—well, the guy that was running the receiving ship there, his name was Bulldog Perry or something—I can't remember his last name—but I had known him on the Maryland when he was a first class bosun mate, and he was a W4 warrant now running that receiving ship. So I went up to see him, and I said, "Man, I don't want to get on that there ammo ship. I'm not a coward, but I don't want to kill myself like that." So he said, "Do you want to go out to the net depot?" He said, "They need somebody out there to do some diving on the net depot. Do you know anything about diving?" I said, "Well, I'll learn." So he sent me out to the net depot. I helped put in some nets


out there and I did even make three or four or five dives, I suppose. Didn't know what I was doing, but I'd have done it anyway.

So I thought, well, if I'm going to be a diver, maybe I should go to school. So I put in for diver school which was being held on Pier 88 in New York, but it was working on the Normandy. She had sank alongside the pier during a fire, and Navy divers patched her up and righted her. So I went there and worked on the Normandy and went through diving school.

When I finished, I went to the Mediterranean. I started in Algiers. Really I landed in Oran, but we went over to Algiers. And they had a ship there that they were trying to get off the ground, and it was the LS Stone. I went down with the other crew members and we put some patches on the thing, but as it wound up we never did float the thing. They just used it as a receiving ship there because there was too much damage to really use it again.

So then I went up to Delles. It was a former yacht basin for the Mediterranean rich, you know. We were still in North Africa up a little ways above Algiers. There was a couple of PTs grounded up there and we got them off the rocks and got them patched up so they could take them to a dry dock in Bizerte. Well as it happened, the dry dock in Bizerte had got torpedoed and bombed and all that stuff, and the river was full of ships that they had blown up. Some sank and others grounded. And the caisson in the dry dock well—they had put it in place and then shot holes in it and even put booby traps down in the thing.

So we left that little old place and went up there to clear up that mess and open up the Ferryville River again. When we got up there, we had to work on PT boats, and I'd had a little bit of experience back in Jacksonville with them when I was doing my bearing wiping. So we did repair work on them so they could go to sea and do their thing. This was before the Seabees got there. We worked on them and did our diving. And then at night we'd go up and stow ammunition as they were beginning to haul ammunition in there. We got a couple of berths open and the first thing they brought in was a load of ammunition, so we had to go up there and unload that.

In the mornings, we'd have to get up about four thirty or five o'clock and go out and sweep the airstrip because those Germans would come over and drop them crows feet on the airstrip which punctured tires, so our fighters couldn't get off and get after them. We'd have to get out there whenever they'd come down and do their thing, then we'd run out—two or three hundred people, I was amongst the group, you know—and we'd sweep the things off so our aircraft could get up and try to get a few of them.

DOB: You must've been learning a lot. CS: I was learning a lot of things.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 5 DOB: I want to move on to the Antarctic, so . . . okay, keep going. CS: So anyway, after the war was over—that's enough about diving. I don't want to go any

further with that. DOB: Well, I know you won a Bronze Star for an incredible experience. CS: Anyway, after that we did other things. We went to Sicily and did work—went up and

done some things there. And on the way to Italy, we broke a shaft on the ARS I was on. So in the Strait of Messina, two of us had to go down and get that shaft out of that thing and then send it over to they called it Charley Town where there was a machine shop down in the boot of Italy right across from Messina—well, it was Messina Strait it was in. I don't know what the island's name was on the side. But anyway, it took them about four or five days to turn out a new shaft, and they brought it back and we installed it and put the prop back on, and then we went on up to Naples.

We went from that thing to the air shelter about four times a day for a while, and finally one day Todd and I decided we weren't going to go anymore. We had about twenty-five ton of dynamite on this ship, you know, and we were sleeping right on top of it. We got tired of running down to the air raid shelter, so we decided we're not going down there anymore so we just laid there and slept. Pretty soon, the Germans came over and they bombed the hospital ship right at our bow. Before the smoke cleared, we were in the air raid shelter.

Then we went to Palermo, Sicily, did a lot of work there—harbor clearance of sunken ships, etc. We were then sent to southern France, to Port De Bouc, France, down on the Rhone River. There we were doing harbor clearance work, diving in mined waters. When a ship struck a mine down river from our location, I was down about thirty feet and was blown out of the water. Kind of knocked me silly for a while, but I recovered okay. Two of my shipmates perished. I was awarded the Bronze Star medal, with Combat "V."

After Port De Bouc, we moved to Toulon, France, where the French had scuttled part of their fleet. We did what we could to clear the port so Allied ships could enter and offload. A ten-man team from our unit was detached to the Azores to move a merchant ship that had blown ashore while offloading at one of the islands. When this was completed, I returned to the States.

With a few stops in between, I was transferred to the amphibious base in Coronado, California. I was assigned to a branch of the R/M division. My job was maintenance repair, overhaul and operate tractors, cranes, Jahimas, and other equipment that was used retrieving amphibious boats used in beach landings during amphibious operations. The Amphibious Fleet was a great experience for me. A world of education about


equipment, repair, and maintenance, plus operating all equipment assigned to this operation. I was there about three years.

In the meantime, in 1948, why they changed the rating structure in the Navy, and me being a shipfitter I was going to have to change over to metalsmith, but I didn't want to be a tin bender. So my commander talked to me about this. I told him, "I don't want to be a tin bender." He says, "Do you see this here? They have group eight rates and they're mechanics and carpenters" and this and this and this, and I said, "Well, how about that mechanic? I've been doing mechanics." "Yes," he says, "you're a better mechanic than most mechanics are already." He said, "Do you want to change to that?" And I said, "Yes, I'd like that."

So they gave me a test down at the CB base. Well, there was eighteen of us in the shop, and I was a shipfitter and everybody else was motor mechs and enginemen. And we went over and took the test and I passed it. I was first class. So I changed over from shipfitter to construction mechanic (CM1), and that's how I got in the Seabees. In August 1948, or thereabout, I was assigned to the 104th MCB in Coronado, California, and started my career as a Seabee.

Sometime in 1949, there was a bulletin about an opening in Pt. Barrow, Alaska, Arctic Test Station. So I put in for that. It was a one year billet, but it took two years to complete our test projects and complete the projects assigned to my division.

And I learned about cold weather. We did work in tractor trains—PET-4 used to haul food and supplies to the oil drilling sites. We had a tractor or two in the trains, and even if we didn't have a tractor, we still had oils and different lubricants, etc. that we were getting to them to use on some of their equipment, and we were testing the results. Some tests required disassembly and recording measurements of all moving parts at the start, then reassembly to do the test operation. Take it apart again and compare measurements for wear and breakage. We also tested batteries, hoses, fan belts, antifreeze, and other items related to tractor weight, lifting, hauling, and transportation. Vehicles were used for cold weather operation and snow removal, and we even built a fairly large sea-ice base.

I was transferred to Port Hueneme, California, after Pt. Barrow, Alaska, and was in Maintenance. I made CMC and had the maintenance crew at MCB Training Schools, Port Hueneme, California. Here we repaired and maintained all equipment used in training mechanics and equipment operators at the schools where all above Class "A" and "B" students were trained in those days. They consisted of earth-moving, weight-lifting, drilling machines, autos, and trucks, etc.

I was at Port Hueneme for four years, and then it was time to go to the islands. I had a set of orders to MCB-7. I said, "Man, I don't want to go to the islands. That's not my cup of tea."

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 7 DOB: Which islands? CS: Well, Guam and Tinian, and all those islands out in the Pacific. So I don't want any of

that. I saw a bulletin that they wanted men to go to Deep Freeze. I put in for that, and I got picked up [snap] just like that.

So I went to Davisville, Rhode Island, where MCB (Special) was being assembled. I moved my family to Rhode Island, and started running into problems that we were going to have with equipment. It didn't take too long to figure out some of the things that needed changing. And one of the things, they just had rollers to carry the tracks across the frame on the D-8. They just had rollers instead of the board. So with a little persuasion, like, "Well, if we can't put oak in there, I'm not going with you because I'm a volunteer." So we got the oak put in there, and that saved us a world of trouble. The oak board replaced the top carrier for the tracks. (In cold weather rollers tend to freeze up and then won't roll well.) We also cut a square hole in each track-pad that would let the snow and mud pass through, thereby saving the front idler and the bottom rollers. I learned this in Pt. Barrow a few years back.

And then they discovered that the blade trunnions were too wide on the little tractor to get it in the airplane much less drop it out, so then I had to go out to Peterson Tractor Company and get that changed.

Then I got to the Weasels and found out they had ten sets of spare tracks for about fifteen or twenty Weasels. That ain't going to work. I went down to a war surplus place in Connecticut and made a deal to buy a hundred sets of tracks. We never did use them all up because I had strict regulations about how you used a Weasel. I don't know how they did in Little America, but we didn't lose many tracks in McMurdo because I was on their case every minute about those things. If you broke a track—which they did once in a while—the operator had to replace it, so everyone was very careful.

DOB: So you had a lot to do with what kind of mechanical equipment was brought to Deep

Freeze. CS: Well, not to begin with. Someone had decided the mix we were going to take.

Somebody that had a lot of brains had already picked all of that out except they just didn't look at the details. So then when it got to Rhode Island, I did my tests on the things and put heaters in them and put radio equipment in them and this kind of stuff. And we did a lot of modifying as much as we could. We didn't have much time because it was time to get them things on a ship. We got them late.

In fact, one of them, I was off over in some little old town in Rhode Island there and we was missing a tractor, and I was just driving along. Me and the wife went to the grocery store and then looked down on a railroad and there was our missing tractor. The D-8


that we had missing was sitting down there on the side track. And nobody knew where it was, so I went back and I told the skipper—well, I usually talked to the skipper anyway. He was that kind of a guy, you know. He wanted to know all the details first, then you could tell the junior officers about it, I guess. In fact I didn't know Mr. Bowers hardly at all anytime we was in Rhode Island. I didn't really know him until I got to Antarctica. I'd seen him a time or two, but he was left out of a lot of things because I think he was still in his duty station. He was an assistant public works officer, and I think he was still working between both groups for a while or something. Anyway, it wasn't easy for him.

But anyway, everything I'd done I just went—most of the time I went to either Slosser, who was the executive officer, or the old man and told him the problems we had with the thing and what I felt we had to do about it. So whenever I discovered about the trunnions, why he told me to get a plane and go out to Peterson Tractor Company and straighten it out, which was out in San Leandro, near San Francisco. So we got that straightened out.

DOB: Were you able to check out all the equipment? CS: What? DOB: Did you have time to check out all of the equipment? CS: I got it where I was fairly satisfied with it. I knew that we could handle whatever else

happened as it happened. The crew was pretty well checked out. I had a pretty gung ho crew.

DOB: How big was your crew? CS: I had about twelve or fourteen men. And of course they were split up between

McMurdo and Little America when we went to the ice. I didn't really get the cream of the crop because Commander Whitney chose the ones that went over there, and I got to choose the ones that was left to go to McMurdo. But that was all right. We made out really good.

DOB: Who would you have taken if you had the choice? CS: Well, I had a guy that I come all the way out here to Port Hueneme, Bill Burleson, to

recruit him to go to Antarctica because I really wanted him there for my gasoline work. We had a lot of gasoline equipment—the Weasels, APUs, etc. and pumps—so I wanted Bill Burleson for that. I finally conned him into it and got him a set of orders to Davisville, and then Commander Whitney took him away from me. Took him to Little America with him, and then almost killed him in an airplane. He sent him off with some of them dudes going out doing some recon work or something for that Byrd Land thing, and they got the airplane off course, landed, and then they were walking back. I


wasn't there so I'm just telling you hearsay stuff, so I won't elaborate on it. Anyway, it was a snafu job.

DOB: Tell me how you got to Antarctica. Were you on one of the ships? CS: I rode down on the Wyandot. It was a cargo ship. DOB: And what's it like when you go down—I mean you've gone through the warm climates

and every day you wake up and it's colder and colder and colder. CS: Then when you hit the ice it gets scary, too. You start hitting that ice several days

before you get where you're going, you know. What do they call that? Lily-pad ice or flake ice or slush ice? I forget those names. But anyway, it takes several days to get through that till you get down to the shelf ice. And then it took a while to get on in where we were going to go because the icebreakers was having a terrible time. In fact, they only got within forty miles of McMurdo when we started offloading.

And about the last load that we hauled in, that very same day the icebreaker almost sunk a sled by breaking in front of it, then they had to go about two miles—maybe it wasn't that far but it seemed like two miles to go—around the icebreaker to get back around on the side with the base. Whenever they found out they could break the ice, they broke ice. A good thing we weren't building an airstrip or the airstrip would've left us the way they broke that ice up that year. But that was after we was all finished with our work.

And we had some terrible times with our equipment. We'd break treads of tracks off because they only had 5/8ths bolts in them and they only had four of them in each one of them big old pads, and if a guy overdone it, you know, trying to climb or something or other with too much load back there, why it would just start spinning pads off of it. That was the biggest thing I did while we were hauling; I was out there bolting pads back on them things. We used all the bolts that we had, and we had a world of spare ones. I had to go to New Zealand. When the first planes come in, I rode back up to New Zealand and I must've got two ton of track bolts and brought back from the Caterpillar dealer in New Zealand.

DOB: Did they fit? CS: Oh yes. They use the same—it's a Caterpillar tractor company, and they use the same

thing. Caterpillar don't go to that metric stuff and that. You get standard or SAE, they call it. But anyway you get standard stuff if you're buying for Caterpillar equipment.

DOB: So when you got to McMurdo, the first job is to unload the ship. CS: Right. DOB: And it sounds like it must've been awfully chaotic.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 10 CS: It was. It was a mess. They had a bunch of them dog drivers that come down there,

you know. One of them was Captain Black and one of them was Commander Bursey, who was a Coast Guard Reserve officer. Several of them dog people were there, several of Byrd's old hands and that, you know, and they wanted to do it like they did it with dogsleds. And this captain wanted us to drive a tractor up there about a hundred and fifty foot from the ship and then use a line to clutch it up near to the ship. Well, we tried that a little while, but I said, "I'm not messing with that garbage."

So anyway, Admiral Dufek, whenever we lost a tractor in the ice—that was one of the first things we done. We had to go across a bridge across a crack in the ice, and they knew there was no way around it because it run all the way across the bay as far as I know. So we had a Bailey bridge that we used. You used the thing about three or four times in a spot and then you had to move it to another spot, because the ice sheared off or rotted after a few crossings and would become only two or three feet thick which was too thin for our loads.

Well, I'd been out there on the ice about twenty-four, maybe thirty hours erecting that kind of stuff and putting pads on the little tractors that was popping off. And so there was another person in charge there and I had been there and told him before I left—you know, I took the last tractor across and then I told him before I left, "Move the bridge down about fifty or a hundred feet." Of course he was a lot smarter than me (had already been on the ice an hour) and had used these bridges across creeks many times and we've heard of such thing. We lost a driver and a very dear tractor plus the cargo, about twenty tons.

Well, on the way back to the ship to lay down and sleep a little while, why I met Williams coming out with the tractor, and I stopped him and I talked to him. I said, "There's no need to hurry up there because they're going to move the bridge." Well, it wound up was they didn't move the bridge and Williams got up there. And when he went up on the bridge—I taught every one of them, you know, I showed every one of them about driving up on the bridge and then letting the tractor ease down. Don't just drive up and let it flop down, you know, because that thing's thirty-nine ton. Thirty-nine ton with about twenty or thirty or forty ton of material back there in back of it makes that thing heavy. It goes up like that and then it slams down, and that's a whole lot of weight.

Well, that ice was shelving off underneath, you know. It might look pretty good on the surface because you can see the first two or three feet of it, it might look pretty good. But two or three feet is not much ice whenever you're doing things like that. Anyway, it broke and down he went. And that was due to an unwise decision as mentioned above.

DOB: That was a terrible experience.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 11 CS: Well, they had an inquiry board and everything else and naturally they had me up before

the inquiry board. I guess I blew off some steam and I was really mad. I was going to kill the guy if I could get my hands on him. I never did get to see him again, and I'm happy for that because I was that mad, you know. He had no business telling that kid to drive that thing across the bridge, because I'd already told him to move it. Well, he didn't think that Slaton's orders meant anything. So Admiral Dufek wrote a memorandum that "on the ice, Chief Slaton was in charge of whatever moved on the ice."

So then I had this run-in with this captain about pulling a tractor up there and loading the stuff on it. So finally he got to me so bad I hollered up to the bridge and said, "Captain, you run that ship up there, it's in the water, and I'll run this tractor which is here on the ice, and I'll take care of all these operations that happen on the ice. Now you can run your ship any way you want to run it. If you want to take it out of here, that suits me just fine. But if it's alongside here, we're going to unload it and I'm going to tell these people how to do it!" And he started to say something, and I said, "Before you get started, I've got a memo that you should read if you haven't already read it, but I'm sure you have because I don't think Admiral Dufek leaves anybody out." I said, "Just read that memo and you'll see that what I'm saying is the truth." And I said, "I don't mean to be discourteous or any other thing, but I'm not here to take any bull off you either. So I'm in charge of the ice, you're in charge of the ship." So then we went back to work.

DOB: You understood each other after that. CS: Well, I never did have to speak to him again. He stayed where I didn't have to speak to

him again. But anyway, we got the job done.

And then during that time, as I told you before, I seen this little tractor out there that the advance party had lost in a crack. So two or three months later, whatever it was, I went out there and salvaged it. We rebuilt it to take to the South Pole, and I had a little old boy—me and him was pretty good buddies—he was our last kid and at that time he was about four or five years old when we went to Rhode Island. So whenever we rebuilt this tractor, I named it the William Joseph and printed The William Joseph across the back of it. [Laughs] But anyway, that's the way the William Joseph come about. We salvaged that thing out of a crack and took it and rebuilt it, and it wasn't even on the Navy books because it had been written off the Navy books and everything else.

DOB: Well now when Williams went down, he was driving a D-8? CS: Right. He was driving a standard D-8. DOB: And this was very early in offloading. CS: I think it was only about the fourth or fifth day if that much.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 12 DOB: So it's a terrible human loss, but it's also the loss of a major piece of equipment. CS: A major piece of equipment. It was very tragic, and it was really a down for everybody,

too. The morale really was at a low ebb then. It took a lot of fire to get them heated up again, but they were good people. We had radiomen and several other rates. You name it and we had them operating equipment. I'd take them on a piece of equipment, show them how everything worked, and say, "You just follow them tracks." And away those rascals would go, and they all got pretty good at it. And some of them even, you know, whenever we was trying to doze off the airstrip, they was out there operating them little old D-2s pushing snow. The cook and anybody else that felt like doing it, you know, and well, we had to have somebody to help us. We didn't have enough people to do all that work because they were working twelve-hour shifts.

And then we was trying to get that airstrip dozed off and then we finally got the thing about ready, and along came a blizzard and filled it right up again. [Chuckles] So we had to move over and do it over again, and then we just used that old one—there was parts of it that it didn't do a thing to, just clear as a bell, so we used them for revetments for the aircraft for offloading that stuff. It was a big downer for those kids to see all their labor shot down. We just had a big party and started over again. We did not get the new runway as wide and as long, but it was sufficient.

DOB: And this was at night? In the winter night? CS: Oh yes. Almost all of it was in the winter night. You can't see, and you don't know if

you're going to break through the ice. I had to tell them all the time, "The ice is twenty-four foot thick. You're not going to break it." [Laughs]

DOB: Not in the wintertime. CS: Those poor kids. I just really hand it to them for that. They were just a good bunch of

children. DOB: Children? CS: That's all they were were children. DOB: How old were you? CS: I was twenty-seven. I think I was twenty-seven. Let's see. That was in '55 and I was

born in '18. I was thirty-seven, wasn't I? Yes, I was thirty-seven, so I was an old man. Some of them called me Pappy. They didn't call me Slats, they called me Pappy. Yes, I was thirty-seven.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 13 DOB: You wrote that you tried to be kind to the old pros, but you said, "Our dogs live on diesel

fuel and gas." CS: [Laughs] That was my sentiments. I tried not to be, you know, I tried to fit in. I tried

to show them that we were capable and to give us our chance like they had their chances. Like if I went down there now, I wouldn't try to tell anybody how to do anything. I wouldn't mention anything about what we done in '55 and '56. But them guys, they'd been down there in the '30s, and I guess some of them was down there in '47 on that Highjump thing. They didn't have tractors, didn't have Jeeps or Weasels, just dogs and sleds, so they're going to tell me how to operate my equipment out there? I didn't buy that. We got the job done.

DOB: So you were the senior person for mechanics— CS: Right. DOB: —at McMurdo, reporting to [George] Purinton who was at Little America? CS: Well, Purinton, he didn't stay down there. Mr. Bowers, I guess, was more or less my

boss. I didn't have a boss really. I just did my job. He was really my boss when we got to the South Pole. I'd see him once in a while, but I guess if I really reported to anybody, I probably reported to Canham.

I didn't tell you about the ride. Mr. Canham was wanting to find a shorter trail out there after a while as we were offloading. So one day he got on me about it, and I said, "Well, I'll tell you what, Commander. You just get your ass up in that tractor there, and you can stand up in the hatch and direct me which way you want to go, and I'll drive you there." So we get down on the ice, and he wants me to go this-a-way. He had a pair of binoculars and all that stuff, you know, and he's looking and looking and he keeps pointing this-a-way, and he was keeping me pretty close to the shoreline which was making me really nervous. We never was a half a mile from the shoreline. So I'm going pretty slow. Things was going along pretty good, and finally he was tired of standing up there with that wind blowing in his face and his face was getting pretty cold, so he sat down. And about the time he sat down, that tractor, boom! Down it went! I thought, oh my God, and he and I both jumped for the hatch, but the thing didn't sink. So I stopped and I said, "What the heck?" I opened the door and looked out and the water was right up to the top of the tracks. Well, them tracks was just covered with water. Of course it wasn't one of the wide tracks. It was just a standard track, eighteen inches wide, I guess. I looked at that a while; we was stopped by then. I said, "This thing is not sinking." I said, "You stand up there and watch and be ready to leap out, and I'll drive a little further and we'll see if we can get out of this mess."


So I kept driving along and driving along and water was sloshing up and ice sloshing up, but we didn't go any deeper in the water. I thought, well, this is all right. So we went probably a quarter of a mile, maybe more than that, but at least a quarter of a mile like that, and sloshing the water and that you know. So pretty soon the thing kind of shuddered, you know, and I knew we'd come to something. So I eased it into low gear and cracked the throttle a little bit and tuk-tuk-tuk up, and the thing got up there and I tilted it down onto the ice, and then I turned around. I said, "Commander, if you want to go any further this-a-way, you take the tractor. But I'm going thataway." [Chuckles] He said, "You take it any way you want to, Chief. I've had enough. I can see that this is stupid." [Laughs]

So we went back to using our trail and watching our bridge. A day or two later, the cutter had got in a few miles further, and I think by then we were probably within twenty-five miles of the base and we did not need the bridge anymore.

But that was the kind of thing that Commander Canham and I did. Well he was lieutenant commander then. But he and I became very close after that. So when I said, "Commander, this is the way it ought to be," I didn't ever say, "This is the way it's going to be." I'd say, "Commander, this is the way it should be or ought to be. What do you think?" "You got it, Chief. You do whatever you think's right." So I guess I didn't pay anybody else too much attention other than say, "Why don't you get out of my hair? I know what I'm doing," or something like that, you know. Even if I didn't know what I was doing, I'd still tell them that because I was going to find out what I was doing soon.

It's like everything else. You had to have the men that would follow you, you know, and you had to lead.

DOB: How do you get them to do that? CS: Well, I treated them however they deserved to be treated. If they needed to be got on a

little bit, I'd get on them. But if they were progressing pretty well, we've got a team, you know, and that's what I really liked is just a team. And there's always got to be a leader of a team. Somebody's got to say tie the knot or untie the knot or something, and that's what I like to do. I turn a man loose on a job, and unless he's got a question, I don't mess with him. And I never would allow a division officer to butt in. You know, several engineering officers are bad about coming and butting into your business.

Right over here in these schools they used to come out there and start telling one of my men what to do, and I'd go up and say, "Get off the job. You don't belong out here on this job. If you want to do something out here on this job, you call me and I'll come and get you and I'll take you and show you what it is. But," I said, "don't be out here messing with my men." I said, "You tell me what to do, and I'll get it done. And I'll see that these men get the word and do the job. But they can't do their job if you're out


here interfering with them." I said, "They're scared of you. You're an officer and they don't like officers. They're afraid of them. They will lose respect for you also."

[End Side A, Tape 1] [Begin Side B, Tape 1] CS: And not them guys down there. If some of the officers come around and fool with them,

they'd just look at them and say, "Who the hell are you?" They never would pay them much attention. They go to their chief. That's what chiefs are for. Through the ten or twelve years before I made chief, I learned that chiefs' big job—and I knew that from even on the battleship that I was on. Whenever junior officers come on that battleship, they always went to their chief with their needs, you know. And if they was doing something wrong, the chief would get to them.

So I learned that it was one of the big parts of a chief petty officer's job was to train junior officers. It looks like they should teach them in the academy, but a lot of them don't go to the academy. So it's up to the chief to take care of that, because really you want to take care of that ensign because sometimes he's going to be the lieutenant or sometimes a lieutenant commander, so you've got to train him the way things are supposed to be. And that's no knock against—that's just the way it is, and I always tried to practice that.

I never tried to go overboard with it or any other thing, you know, although I have had some pretty good arguments aside from that part. But even then I knew I was out of place when I was doing it. But I've always had a pretty terrible temper, so sometimes you can go so far [laughs] and then we've got to stop this, you know.

DOB: Well, let's talk about being a mechanic on the ice. It seems to me that one of the—well,

first of all, how long was it before you had a garage to work in? And how much of your work was done outside?

CS: We got our garage up in about three months or maybe even more. Before we got our

garage, we were just maintaining the equipment outside in the weather. You know, lubing it and making minor repairs and whatever was needed.

But we never had any major breakdowns till—well, the first major thing we had happen was the D-8. Along in the middle of the winter, the transmission froze up in the thing. It had to set for probably five or six hours. The kid went out and got on it and didn't let it get heated up good enough, and the transmission gear didn't get warm. It had ice in it and it froze up the gears, but it broke the reversing gear out of the thing and part of the other gears that get to the reversing gear.


So we had to pull that thing apart, and we didn't have any of those gears in spare because whoever decided how many parts we should take didn't think about transmissions, I guess. So we pulled the gears out, what was left, and baled them up with welding and that. Then Lundy, who actually was a machine repairman but a good machinist, and Grisez, who was a pretty good young machinist, too, ground those gears back to shape, and we fitted them all, you know, put them all on the shaft and fitted them all and that. And if one wasn't working just right, we would dress it up a little bit with emery cloth or whatever. And then we fitted all those gears back and then put it back together and made it work. She was still going when I left there.

[Interruption] CS: Back to the mechanical thing. We didn't really have any other major breakdowns.

That was the only major breakdown we had in our equipment. The rest of it was just track maintenance. But we did maintenance all the time on those things. We didn't take any chances on them not having oil or lubricant for their rollers, because they had rollers on the bottom and that, you know. But we maintained that equipment really good. You'd make a couple of trips and you'd bring it in and you'd service the thing, and we always had a man to service and that, you know.

DOB: You must've been busy. CS: Well yes. It was busy. I'm telling you it was busy. Like when we was offloading, we

didn't stop, I don't think. We worked around the clock. Most of the guys didn't, but us guys that was taking care of the equipment, we had to work around the clock because if someone's sitting out there somewhere with pads off, we were the only ones that had the tools to put them back on with. So I've been out on that ice and several of my men been out on that ice eighteen and twenty hours when we were offloading. It was a terrible mess.

Some of us were living on the ships and some were living in tents at McMurdo. The ones of us that were living on the ships were eating pretty good, but them guys was eating K rations and all other kinds of garbage up there, and it was pretty hard on them. At least we thought it was hard.

DOB: You were living on the ship at the time. CS: But I was living on the ship. I was kind of enjoying it, really. I was getting out there

and doing my fifteen or twenty hours and then going back and taking a hot shower and hit the sack after a good hot meal.

DOB: Luxury. CS: I was sorry to see those ships go.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 17 DOB: Well, it seems to me—back to your work—that one of the things that you've just got to

have if you're a mechanic is manual dexterity. How can you do that in the cold? CS: It's not easy but you can do it. You wear gloves, mittens and that as much as you can,

and you've got to be very careful when you're messing with wrenches and bolts, because if you pick up a wrench in your hand, it'll freeze in your hand. If you pick up a bolt, it'll freeze it to your fingers.

DOB: So how do you solve that problem? CS: Well, you just don't do it because when you do, you wound up with sore thumbs and sore

this or sore that or sore hand. You try to keep a mitten between you and it all the time. We had those nice little woolen mittens that really worked good, but sometimes you can't get around it.

So sometimes, like putting a track bolt in there, the only thing you can get the nut up in there with was bare fingers. Of course you could use a glove finger on the top to start it with, you know, and then you can put your other glove back on and tighten the thing up. But the only way you're going to get that nut up in there is with bare fingers. There's not room for mittens to go up in there, and you wound up your fingers—that finger of mine still is affected from doing that.

Whenever it was warmer, that didn't bother you. Whenever it got up to zero or above zero, why it never bothered me much. I don't think it bothered anybody very much. But whenever it's cold, you've just got to be terribly careful with it. And fortunately, we didn't have anybody that really suffered from that to my knowledge. We might've had some that did, but I never did know about it.

DOB: How do you keep from losing your tools in the snow? CS: You put them back where they go every time you use it. You put it back in something

that it goes in, you know. You have a box with you. And you don't lay them down very much, because if you laid them down very much, pretty soon you would have no tools, and we had enough tools to do what we needed to do but we didn't have any to throw away.

And that was another thing I had a pretty good battle with to begin with was getting the right tools down there. They were just going to take tools off of the shelf, you know, and use them standard issue. But I really put up a squawk on that, and I said, "If we can't get Snap-ons or Sears and Roebuck Craftsman,"—which Snap-on makes—"I think I don't want to go down there with you because I've already went through this stuff in Pt. Barrow, Alaska, and I'm not going through it again." So we had Snap-on tools.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 18 DOB: Did you have enough? Plenty of spares? CS: Yes, we did. DOB: And the right tools? CS: Yes. That was the one thing that I got to choose was the tools. No one had given tools

much consideration. They were just going to go off of the shelf and get some tools and put in packs and send them down there. But this old chief wasn't having any of that. So here again, me and Commander Whitney got together and had to go down to the bureau and fight with the supply chief in the bureau down there to get enough money to buy Snap-on tools with, because he wouldn't go to Sears and Roebuck. Snap-on builds their Craftsman tools, so it didn't make any difference to me. We could've probably got them for half the price, but he wouldn't do that.

DOB: So you had a pretty good budget. CS: Well, we got a pretty good budget for that part anyway. We had all the tools we

wanted. DOB: One of the most important things, I suppose, during that first wintering over at McMurdo

was getting ready for the next season's primary task which was to build the station at South Pole. What were your specific responsibilities in preparing for the following summer?

CS: Well, our biggest responsibility was getting that airstrip built. And then after the

airstrip was built, then we started concentrating on the South Pole. Of course I always had the South Pole in mind all the time. But all I had to do was have the tractor ready and enough fuel oil lined up, enough lubricants and that kind of stuff. That was all that I had to worry about. Bevilacqua and other folks worried about other things. We had a utility man that worried about the stoves and the heaters and that kind of stuff. But my responsibility had to deal with the equipment and the lubricants and that that went with the equipment and the tools to put in a generating plant and this kind of stuff. But I didn't have responsibility for installing the generating plant. That was the utility people did that. My job was maintaining that.

DOB: And getting the airstrip ready so the planes could come in to do those airdrops. CS: At McMurdo, yes. That was our biggest job was doing that, because it took a lot of

equipment maintenance and a lot of people hours. We worked twenty-four hours a day in twelve-hour shifts doing that. And even the commander and Mr. Bowers, all the officers mess-cooked. The only person that didn't mess-cook was me because I worked two shifts most of the time. [Laughs] I'd be with this group getting this done, and then I'd get a few hours sleep, and then I'd go with the other group and get them through their


part. So I ate about four times a day. Every time a group ate, I ate, so I got fat. [Chuckles] But I was the only one that didn't mess-cook. And I wouldn't have minded mess-cooking, except they just excused me from mess-cooking and told me I had enough to do.

DOB: It sounds like you did. CS: I didn't get mad about it, though. [Laughs] DOB: Now Dick Bowers, who was the Officer in Charge of building Pole Station, selected a

twenty-four-man crew, and you were one of those. CS: Right. DOB: And he divided them into six survival teams of four people each. Tell me about that.

Why did he do that? And how worried were you about survival on the Polar Plateau and the possibility of walking out?

CS: Well, I had some kind words about that. I said, "I'll go through your training. I've

already had two years of it in Pt. Barrow, Alaska." But I said, "I'll go through your training because you might have something new to offer." So I did. I went out there with my team, and we pulled our sled around in the back side of the point, and we lived out there. I think four days we lived out there and lived on pemmican and some other garbage that we took out there with us. And we even opened up our survival gear and learned how to get it and all that kind of stuff.

But I told the guy, "You can do what you want to do." They even trained us in the grid navigation and that, you know. I said, "You guys can do what you want to do. But if I'm out there and an airplane crashes that I'm in, I'll still be there when they find the airplane. I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying where the airplane is." I told Mr. Bowers that, I told Mr. Canham that. I said, "There's no way that I'm going to walk away. I'm not getting away from the airplane until somebody comes and gets my butt. I'm not walking anywhere down here." And I think that was probably the way a lot of the others felt, I don't know. I don't have anything against learning how to survive, but what would you survive on in Antarctica anyway if you run off and left your food?

DOB: Well, I would assume that the survival team would bring their food with them. CS: You can only carry so much. You might be out there a month walking around. So I

want to stay where the food is. I'm not going to try to carry enough food to survive a month on. Well, I mean each has his own ideas about that. Everybody should be trained to survive. You cut back on this and cut back on that and use the minimum of whatever you've got to survive on. But I just don't think that you should walk away from where you are, because somebody knows that you're there, and they know where


you should've been at, and they could search so many miles on each side of that and find you.

DOB: What if a plane couldn't land at the Pole? Nobody had yet at the time that you were

doing this training. CS: Well then, we weren't going to go to the Pole anyway. [Laughs] DOB: Or if you were on the plane that landed and couldn't take off. What would that say for

the next plane? Would it be able to land and take off? CS: Hopefully. The admiral told me . . . whenever he'd come back from down there, he told

me that they was going to have to take me down there and drop me in by parachute, and then they'd drop me a tractor and I could drag them bumps down—they call them sastrugi or something like that. I don't know what they call them. Anyway they're ripples in the snow. And then I was going to have to smooth out those bumps so the plane could land.

I looked at him. I said, "Admiral, I know you're sick from being up there on that hill, but you're out of your rabbit ass mind if you think I'm going to jump out of an airplane. There's not enough people down here to throw me out of an airplane."

[Laughter] CS: I said, "You just send me up there in a plane and then you drop me the tractor, and I'll see

that the plane gets off the ground and I'll smooth it out for the rest of them. But I'm not jumping out of an airplane." That ended that thing. [Laughs]

DOB: How much did you know about the handful of people who had already been at the South

Pole? CS: Oh, I had read their exploits and that and read about their dogs and what they done.

And to be perfectly honest, I didn't think they was all that bright. Why would anybody go down there and kill themselves like that? I didn't think I was very bright going down there, really.

DOB: But you said you would. CS: But I said I would. DOB: Why did you say you would? You didn't have to. CS: Well, I wanted to see if those guys were right. I didn't think it was all that tough. I

thought maybe they just had their TV people with them or something or other and killed


themselves or starved themselves to death because of that. No, I didn't think that. But anyway, somebody's got to break the ice, and I guess that's what they were trying to do. But they should've waited till they got a little better equipment to do it with, which I think is what we done. We waited till we got a little better equipment to do it with. We could've got killed as fast or quicker—well, our death would've been a whole lot quicker than theirs. But we went well enough equipped that if we didn't crash, we'd get the job done, which we did. And since then there's been a lot of people walk to the Pole, I guess, but there was an airplane up there to pick their bucket up anywhere they wanted to get picked up at.

DOB: That does help, doesn't it? Well, all of this depended on whether Dufek could land at

the Pole—it all depended on whether an airplane could land at the Pole, and then Dufek did that on Halloween of 1956. But that plane very nearly didn't get off the ground, and Admiral Dufek delayed the building of Pole Station after that, and it sounded to me like morale took a bit of a nosedive at that point. Is that true? Everybody was ready to go.

CS: Well, we all just laughed about it really, I think, because we thought, well, they're just

getting in their publicity time. Because I already knew that airplanes didn't stick to snow. If you leave it set there two or three days they might freeze up there. But if you're going to just land an airplane and be there ten or fifteen minutes or an hour, it's not going to stick to the snow.

Of course the only reason they needed JATO bottles up there, them skis do have a lot of drag and so they needed JATO bottles to get them up to flying speed. And don't forget they were at 9300 feet, too. They did need JATO to get off the ground, I'll grant them that, and they would've been dumb not to use JATO.

But they weren't stuck to the snow. I wasn't there when they was there, but I was next in line down there, and I didn't see any airplane stick to the snow. We had them set there for hours, and I didn't see any of them stick to the snow. They cranked up the engines and turned around and left. Granted the first ones, whenever they let us off, they had their engines running and we got off.

But I can show you pictures at the house of when I got off the plane, I got out with my camera and I shot several pictures before he ever moved, and all the people coming from the plane or going around the plane, they're looking. The plan I was on got off pretty fast, but he was still there ten or fifteen minutes on the ice or snow, and he could've stayed there five hours on the snow and that ice. On the snow you can stay there five hours and still done the same thing. Granted they were at 9300 feet, it was cold, there was snow and ice, and that can make anyone in an aircraft very antsy. Those airdales did a great job. Bless their hearts.

I don't know how many of the crews ever flew up in the cold country in Alaska, but there's a lot of pilots—I rode with a lot of pilots in Alaska, and we sat out there in that


stuff at seventy-six degrees below zero. And whenever we got ready to take off, we cranked up the plane and taxied around and took off. And it was on skis. Seventy-six degrees below, and it wasn't that cold at the South Pole.

So that's a bunch of bosh. The airdales might not tell you this, but I'll tell you this because I've got as many hours in that as some of them airdales do, flying their airplanes in the cold. In fact in Antarctica, one time I had four or five more hours in the quarter than any airdale down there had in copters and that. So I flew as much as—I've been around in the cold in airplanes from big'uns to great big'uns. I've never been in one of them big things they've got down there now, but I've been in Alaska. I had to fly a lot out on that tundra. They had equipment out there that I had to get my readings off of and that, so I knew what happened in the cold.

So I just kind of laughed whenever they talked about—I laughed at the admiral himself about that garbage. And Gus Shinn, I used to really badmouth him about that. He's a pretty easy guy to be able to talk to like that. He'd go around bullshitting people like that. [Laughs]

DOB: But then that plane that dropped you at the Pole left, and there you are— CS: So? DOB: —and how does it feel to have a plane take off and there's nothing there? CS: I just want him to be sure he comes back later. We're going to go ahead and get this

base constructed here, but I want you to come back and get me. Don't forget I'm down here.

But like I was telling the guys today, whenever we got off the plane—I was in about the third plane that went down there, I guess, because Tuck and the dogs and Mr. Bowers and Chaudoin and . . . there was three or four or five people down there. They had a tent or two up that they was living in, but whenever we got off the plane, we had to go over and put our hut together before we could go to bed. We put that Jamesway hut together when we got off the plane and we were [huffing and puffing], starving to death for some air and that. And all of us was in pretty darn good shape because we'd been working, and we were in pretty good shape. But it took us two or three hours to get so we could move, you know. So we had to go put up our Jamesway hut before we could even go to bed.

We'd slept in tents the first part of the McMurdo operation. We didn't want to sleep in tents anymore. Tents are okay once they get the snow built up around them; they were warm as anything else. But they're a mess until they get the sides of them froze up, but you still need a good down sleeping bag or you will freeze to death in them.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 23 DOB: How useful were the dogs? CS: [Chuckles] My expression won't fit in this thing, but whoever sent those dogs down

there should've had to take them home and feed them the rest of their lives. Those dogs, they took up more room and were more trouble, required more manhours . . . those people could have been doing something useful. They had to take them to the South Pole, too. Tuck must've been ashamed of himself being down there with those dogs, because there wasn't anything they could do at the South Pole. If we hadn't had the Weasel down there to begin with, those dogs couldn't pull that chair across that snow much less anything else at that altitude. Those dogs were worthless.

DOB: You sound like a man who likes mechanical things. Well, what were your main duties

to get the South Pole station done? CS: My job was to retrieve the airdropped stuff and get it back to the station. And we

stacked enough fuel alongside each building to last it a year for their stoves and that stuff, you know. And then the surplus stuff we put in a place out away from the building site.

DOB: For safety. CS: For safety, yes. For our safety. And then me and my two men, we not only helped the

builders, we helped the utilities people. Whatever there was to do, we did. When building material was delayed due to weather or other problems, everyone pitched in to help retrieve it when it came in. We were a gung ho group.

Sometimes we'd have to chase it down and chase the chutes down with the Weasel. A guy would jump off the bow of the Weasel onto the cargo pallet and cut the shrouds on the parachute. Have you ever seen any of the pictures of the airdrops?

DOB: Yes. CS: I'd like to show you some of the pictures that I took up there. I should've had you up at

my house this morning. I showed these guys a hundred slides of just generally stuff that we done in Antarctica, because I take that out to my camping clubs and show them the things sometimes. But anyway, that's a sight to see. But them parachutes, whenever they get down, if there's the least bit of wind, they'll start dragging your cargo away from you, so you've got to get there quick and get it cut loose.

In fact, one time it wasn't a real heavy load, but it had one of the big chutes on it, and that thing come down. I got a picture of it standing there absolutely straight up and down, you know, with the cargo setting on the snow, and the next second that thing was going thataway. It tipped over that way and was gone. We chased that thing probably up to five miles, four or five miles it seems to me. It might not have been that far, but it was quite a ways. Whenever we got it chased down and I got tied onto it, I looked around and I couldn't see the base. So it had to be four or five miles. It was like trying to look


up over a hill and got you antsy, because you need to get within sight of the base before your tracks were covered.

Of course we had the tracks to follow back if the wind didn't fill them up, but that's what you always did when you was out. You always watched for your tracks. And if it looked like the wind was going to cover them up, you stopped what you was doing and go back thataway till you come to them again. We never had to do that, but I mean we knew what to do in case our tracks did start getting covered up and we hadn't caught what we was after yet. But that fortunately did not occur. But had it occurred, I'd have turned right around and went back while I could see the tracks and hunted that thing later probably. But that didn't happen, so we retrieved all the stuff that fell that didn't have parachute failure, which happened to some of our fuel oil. We also lost some other material this way, but we managed to get by.

Stream-ins we called them. We had a lot of stream-ins. I don't recall how many, but we had several stream-ins. Some of them we were able to dig out, and some of them we never could get down to. We never did find them—we just couldn't find them.

DOB: How much damage was there? CS: I think it was pretty negligible. I don't recall. Some of the building material got

boogered up, and they tried to free-drop some oil, diesel fuel, and we didn't recover much of that. But they didn't do that but just, oh, four or five or six drops I think. I don't know, but I don't think any more than that. It just scattered out too far, and most of it went in the snow or ice or the drum busted or whatever. We would probably get two barrels out of six or eight barrels, but that free-dropping didn't work very good. They don't like to be dropped fifty foot on anything. [Laughs] And they didn't do very much of it.

They free-fell a lot of our lumber. We did lose some lumber because they did not have it baled tight enough for a free fall. They'd come down to fifty or a hundred feet, I suppose. They're supposed to come down to fifty feet, but I don't think any of them got that low. I know I wouldn't. And they'd kick it out and then we would go to the far end of the mess and come back to the base retrieving any that was usable, fifty percent maybe. So we did lose some lumber. But I never did hear Bevilacqua complain too much, so we must not have lost all that much.

DOB: It must be tricky if you have something stream in and get lost or damaged and you need

that piece in order to build what you're building that day. CS: Complete what you're doing, right. DOB: How do you work around that?

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 25 CS: This is where ingenuity comes in. There's always something that'll take its place, so

you've got to figure that out, you know, which we were very capable of doing. Like . . . I don't know, we had something of the wrong length. It was too long. It was made out of aluminum, and they didn't have a saw to cut the aluminum with. I said, "You don't need any saw to cut the aluminum with. Just take a handsaw and saw the thing off." Well they had never heard of that, and they weren't buying that very much. I said, "Give me the handsaw and I'll show you." But I don't recall much about that thing. But anyway, if you ever need to saw some aluminum, you don't have to have an aluminum saw. You can just saw it with your handsaw.

DOB: That's good to know. Well, cold and wind and altitude are all problems on the Polar

Plateau. How did they affect you? And how was the weather generally when you were there?

CS: Well, we generally had pretty nice weather, I thought. I never did know exactly what

the temperatures was, but I thought they was probably up to as high as forty or fifty degrees below, but I imagine most of the time it was much less than that. But it didn't affect us all that much because we was already used to cold, and we used to have on long johns and just a shirt and a pair of pants.

And a lot of times I just wore plain sandshoes. They're a high-top shoe, you know. I wore my felt boots some, but they was in your way when you was trying to drive, you know. Them old big soles, you try to push the brake and you pushed everything else. Or you try to push the clutch and you pushed the brake. You know, they were just in the way, so I usually just used sandshoes most of the time.

And I had a parka but I never wore it a lot. I mostly just had on one of them GI wool sweaters over my other clothes whenever I was going to be outside quite a bit. But most of the guys, they didn't—well, I guess they did wear those red and blue and white and green suits you see, but I don't think I ever put mine on. I didn't need that thing.

DOB: How long did it take you to get used to the altitude? CS: Three or four hours. Well, at least I could navigate in three or four hours pretty good.

But I think it takes about a week for you to really get your system working. But we were fairly busy and I wasn't paying much attention to that. You go till you had to sit down, so you sat down a while and then you get up and go again.

DOB: Did anybody get sick? CS: I don't think anyone got sick from the altitude. DOB: Did they get sick from anything else?

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 26 CS: I don't think so. DOB: Did you have a medic with you? CS: Yes, we had our corpsman with us. One time they told me that I got snow blindness. I

did come in one day and I couldn't see very good, and they told me I had snow blindness. They put some patches over my eyes for an hour or two, and I got up and went back to work. And I might've been the only casualty that way, but I wasn't enough casualty for them to write about it. They did put some patches over my eyes for an hour or two, and I laid down and had a good nap and didn't feel like I was dead-beatin'. But if there was something going on where I thought I should be there—because there was enough for everybody to do, and if you missed one guy, then somebody else had to do what you were supposed to be doing. So I didn't like that, so I tried to be there all the time.

DOB: Tell me about Christmas at the South Pole. CS: Well, I'll tell you, we had a Christmas tree. Somebody from Oregon, I think, sent us a

Christmas tree, and we had a lot of decorations and we had a lot of beer and we had some Old Methusalem and some sickbay brandy. We all got drunk.

DOB: Were you still building at that time? CS: Well, we had a day or two off because there were no airdrops going on. Whenever we

was caught up with our work, then we slept, or whenever you got finished sleeping, why you sat around and played cards or drink beer even.

DOB: I'm sure it wasn't as cushy as you make it sound. CS: It just so happened that around Christmastime the weather was pretty bad down at

McMurdo, I guess, and we weren't getting any airdrops, and we were caught up on our work. We had done just about everything that we could do. We hadn't got finished with the wind barriers that we was putting around the barracks—well, around the buildings period. In the pictures did you see those two-by-fours running up and burlap on them and that? We hadn't quite completed that yet, I don't guess. But we didn't have enough material there really to complete anything. In other words, it was a good excuse if you wanted to get boozed up Christmas and don't work the next day.

DOB: I understand you had a run-in with Lieutenant Bowers at some point at the Pole. CS: Well, we did. DOB: Do you want to tell me about that? I'd like your version. CS: Yes, I'll tell you my version. He and Dr. Siple slept in the mess hall. And I think it

might've been after the Christmas party when this happened, but it might've been


another—I think it was after the Christmas party when it happened. Anyway, I'll go on that. Anyway, we went over to the mess hall. Before we went to the Pole, I asked Spiers, "I don't care what else you take, but take plenty of rice and butter and sugar because I like rice with cinnamon and butter on it, so be sure and take a lot of that." So every time I'd get a break, I'd come in and old Spiers would have me some rice and butter and cinnamon ready, you know. So everybody got into that habit.

So I guess we were all drunk when we went over to the mess hall to finish up our Christmas party. I don't remember, really. I think that's when it was. Anyway, we was all pretty noisy, and I don't blame him for being annoyed. But then like I told him, "You've got no business sleeping in the mess hall anyway. There's plenty of room for you and Dr. Siple to sleep in another building, so why don't you get your ass over there and sleep in there? This mess hall is the only recreation thing we've got, and we're going to stay here till we get ready to quit. You can like it or lump it." And I used nasty language, too.

And then by the time I went to bed and woke up in the morning, why I felt pretty lousy about it. So I got up and apologized to him, and I was sincere. I meant it. I was sorry that I'd done that. I had no business doing that.

The only thing is if I'd have been sober, I'd have still told him that "People are having their recreation, and this is the only place they've got to do their recreation. Mr. Bowers, why don't you and Mr. Siple move over there? There's a perfectly good building over there and not a soul in it, and it's got a heater in it. Why don't you move over there?" And that's probably the way I should've told him then, but whenever you're drunk you don't think that good. So I told him in good old Seabee language to get his ass out of our mess hall. He didn't belong in there anyway.

But I did get up and apologize to him, and I sincerely meant that I was wrong. And I think he was mad enough at me he was thinking about sending me back to McMurdo. The way I felt about it, I didn't care if he called a plane and sent me back that night. [Laughs]

DOB: That would've been an expensive disciplinary action. CS: It probably would've. But anyway, it was an incident that should not have happened,

and a drunk don't have any business trying to tell a drunk how to do things anyway. I mean whenever two people are drunk, neither one has got any business trying to tell the other one much.

DOB: He was not drunk, was he? Was he? CS: I think all of us were drunk. Looking at the pictures that we took, I think we were.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 28 DOB: What else would you like to say about the experience at the South Pole? CS: Well, I'm happy that I was in the first group that built the first station down there. I'm

really happy to have been a part of that, and it was of no great sacrifice to me, but I know my wife sure suffered back home trying to take care of the kids and missing her husband. But anyway, it was a beautiful experience, and I'm proud that I was a part of it. And I'm also proud to have served with Mr. Bowers and all the rest of the folks that I served with. He knows that I think the world of him, and I'm proud of the fact that I apologized to him, too. He is a very good person, and I would proudly serve with him anywhere in the world to this day.

DOB: How soon after you returned from Pole Station did you leave the ice? CS: We got back to McMurdo sometime in January, and I think we left in March. I had time

to take a lot of good pictures of whales. I had all kinds of time. I took pictures of whales, got down on the ice and tease them, you know, till they come around and get up on the ice and then I'd run back and take their pictures. John Dore and I did that one morning. We started about one o'clock, and we stood out there and took pictures till about two o'clock.

The Kiwis had killed some seals and had them laying about sixty feet from the ice edge, and the whales were trying to break that ice down to get to the seals. Well, we interrupted their thing, you know, by getting over there and doing this. But we marked us off a place that we knew we needed to get back to. So we'd get over there and we'd get them whales going around and around in a circle, and when they're heading toward us, then we'd run back there and we already had our cameras set and everything. All we had to do was snap pictures, you know. We had whales up on the ice with just their tails still flapping in the water. The rest of them was up there trying to bend that ice down so they could get us or get the seals over there.

It was a fun thing. Stupid, I guess, but it was fun. I got some good pictures. But then the chaplain stole most of my good ones from me. He was borrowing my pictures and looking at them, so he took my very best ones and then left me the rest. I still got some good ones, but the very ones where it looks like I'm in his mouth taking the picture, Father John took it. I understand they're in some museum in Missouri now . . . which is all right. I didn't care. I got whale pictures.

DOB: Have you been back to Antarctica? CS: No. DOB: Would you go back?

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 29 CS: I've had a couple chances to go back. No, I didn't want to go back. I knew the skipper

of VX-6 in the '70s there, in the late '70s. I can't say his name now, but I still know his family. Anyway, he told me, he said, "Slats, anytime you want to go down there and we've got a flight down there, all you've got to do is let me know and you've got it." But I just never . . . I don't know. The two best duty stations in the world's the one that you're going to and the one that you just left. I just never did want to go back. I wouldn't even go back today, I don't think, if somebody put me in a luxurious airplane and hauled me down there and had luxurious quarters. I'm a United States-loving dude. I don't mind going up to Canada or Alaska and spending a little time in Canada, but that's enough for me.

DOB: What effect, if any, did your polar experience have on the rest of your life in later

directions you took? CS: Well, hardly any. That was just another experience. It's kind of like diving. When I

quit diving in '54, I was finished with diving. And when I finished with Antarctica in '57, I was finished with Antarctica, and I went on to the next thing. In fact, I retired out of the Navy in 1958.

DOB: Well, after this experience and forty years later, you won a commendation medal for your

work on the ice. And I'd like to ask you how you felt about that medal, first of all just having it, and second, that it took forty years to get it.

CS: Well, my biggest thoughts on it is my appreciation for the people that worked to get it for

me, and I believe that was mostly Mr. Bowers and through Mr. Bergstrom, I think. Between those two that's how that came about. And I think the people that they picked, I think there probably should've been some other than me that got one. But anyway, three of the others I was really happy to see them get medals, because Bill Hess especially—I was in the Navy a long time, and I never seen a storekeeper that performed like he did. Of course I wasn't over at Little America with those other two fellows, but I know George Moss a long time and he was certainly a gung ho fellow, as we say for good people, and the Doc was, too. But anyway, I certainly appreciate getting the medal—

[End Side B, Tape 1] [Begin Side A, Tape 2] DOB: You said if you had your druthers— CS: If I had my druthers, I'd rather we'd had that hazardous duty pay that we should've gotten.

My family could've lived a lot better with that.


But I am very happy—and here again I realize that if it weren't for the crew that I worked with, I certainly wouldn't have accomplished anything. So it belongs to my crew, and that's what I told Mr. Bowers about getting the medal. You go get your medal and be proud, because if you don't get your medal, then that shows that you don't give a damn what we done either and don't think much of us, and that's exactly the way I feel about my crew that I worked with. If it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have amounted to much. But I am proud to possess the medal for them.

DOB: That's very generous. CS: Well, that's the way it is. DOB: How about I just ask you some general questions, and starting with just your impressions

of people who were there, and you've talked about some of them already. Let's start with Admiral Dufek. What did you think of him? Was he the right man for the job?

CS: Well, not being in the higher echelon like that, my best answer I can give you is that I

thought he was a hell of a good leader, and he was an admiral that I wouldn't mind going anywhere with.

DOB: You trusted him? CS: I trusted him. DOB: Do you think he had good judgment? CS: I think he did, yes. I know there's a lot of people had different thoughts about it, but I

think Admiral Dufek was very good at it or he would've never been an admiral. I don't think he was that big a politician. He might've been, but . . . .

DOB: Did you ever meet Admiral Byrd? CS: Yes, I met Admiral Byrd. DOB: What did you think of him? CS: He was a politician. He was a good explorer, but he was a politician. And I even

know Admiral Dufek's two sons. My son served with them. They're airdales and my oldest son served with them. He was an airdale, too. They're pretty good people, those boys, as far as I'm concerned. There might be a lot of bad things about Admiral Dufek, but I don't know any of them. I was happy with his leadership is what I'm saying. I think he might have had the same problems with the old-timers as I had, but he handled it okay.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 31 DOB: Dave Canham. CS: He was not in his element, but he was a good man. DOB: What would've been his element? CS: He was an aviator. He didn't know anything about construction or building things. He

was an aviator and probably a hell of a good aviator. He was a good leader, though. He did fine as far as I was concerned. He and I got along good anyway. I don't know if he told me or if I told him, but I let him know that he was the boss. But next to him, whenever he got finished bossing, it stopped at me, but he was going thataway, and so that's the way we headed. But anyway, I had a lot of respect for him. Like I say, I really loved the man. He was a good fellow.

He was no engineer, you know. I don't think he had the right education for the job that he was assigned, but he got it thrown off on him, I think, because the guy that would've been our Officer in Charge, Lieutenant Slosser, who was our exec up in Rhode Island, he got passed over for commander. He was a mustang, and he got passed over for commander, so he got out of the Navy. But he would've been the man for the job, but that's neither here nor there. We still got the job done. Commander Canham done his share, too.

DOB: How about Dick Bowers? CS: Once we got him trained, he was all right. But he was at a disadvantage, too. He was

a young fellow out of a public works department, and he hadn't been out in the field much, I don't think. In fact I know he hadn't been out in the field very much. I don't think he got the field training he needed for this job, but he did a good job for a lieutenant j.g. who was still green around the ears, or whatever you say. I liked him all right. I have a great respect for him. He had a lot of guts. He was a gutsy dude to even take a job like that. Overall, I just really like Dick Bowers. I really do.

DOB: Paul Siple. CS: I really liked Paul Siple, too. He was like me—he was a rag-picker. He didn't let

anything go to waste, and I used to help him gather up stuff around the job site. I think he liked me fairly well because I was his type. I said, "No, we shouldn't throw that away. Let's keep that because we can use this with this, this and this." He'd been down there—he was one of the few men that had been down there with Byrd and I really thought—he didn't get carried away with dogs and all that garbage, you know. He was ready for something new, even if he was a rag-picker, save everything. You need to save everything when you're in a place like Antarctica. But no, I liked old Paul Siple. In fact, I never called him Paul. I called him Dr. Siple, which I do to all people that's


got that type of education. If you've got a doctorate degree, I call you Dr. Anyway, I liked him.

DOB: Jack Tuck? CS: Jack was all right, but he was—well, he just didn't have a job. He had those dogs.

That was an insult to a man's intelligence. But he done the best he could with what he had, you know. He trained his dogs as best he knew how. I guess he'd had some training in training those things. So anyway, I think he done what he was assigned to do. I didn't have to work with him or for him or anything else, so I didn't really learn much about him. He was kind of a loner anyway.

It was like Mr. Bergstrom. I never had much to do with him. He was out of his elements. No, he wasn't out of his elements. He was down there as an aviator, but we didn't have much flying to do. VX-6 did that. And he could not fly anyway because he broke both his arms—he fell off a damn building and broke his arms—broke his elbows. He was in sad shape, the poor guy. I felt so sorry for him. I'm getting a headache.

DOB: That's all right. You're doing fine. How about Father John Condit? CS: Well, Father John was a priest, and what can you say about them? He converted me to

Catholicism. I'd been wanting to do it for years and years, but I never could find one that would put up with my mouth, you know, till he come along. So I got to talking to him about it one day before we went down there, and I told him my problem I'd had with priests, you know. I said, "They don't understand their language, and they want me to clean up my language, or they want me to do this or that." And I said, "I'm not going to do that. But I don't think I have to do that to be a Catholic anyway." And he said, "You sure don't."

So anyway, we got things straightened out about what you had to do, and I said, "Okay, you teach me." So on the way down he taught me. And I was able to get by his scrutiny, and he baptized me when we got inside the Antarctic Circle. So I was the first man that they know of that was baptized down there.

DOB: My heavens. Anyone else that you met on the ice that you particularly admired or

respected or had a close friendship with? CS: Well, I'm pretty good friends with almost all the guys that I was down there with, and

some of them better than others. There was one guy in particular that come down on the ice that I really disliked. His name was Commander Bursey, and he was a Coast Guard reserve who had been there with Admiral Byrd sometime in the past.

DOB: That you disliked.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 33 CS: Yes, that's what I say. DOB: Why did you dislike Bursey? CS: Well, all he was down there for was to get in your way. He was writing a book and that

was all his interest was writing his book. He didn't care if anything got done or not. And he was in your way every time you turned around. I tried to run over him—no, I didn't try to run over him, but I wanted to run over him with a tractor two or three different times. Why they'd ever let baggage like that down there I don't know. And he was one of them old dog boys.

DOB: Already some strikes against him for that. CS: Right. I have nothing against the dog boys except that was their time; let me have my

time. It's like a few years from now, there won't be any tractors down there. That thing will still be going on down there maybe, but there won't be tractors down there. They'll be doing it some other way. Like I say, I wouldn't even go down there now and open my mouth. I'd go down there and gawk, but I wouldn't open my mouth about anything that's happening because it looked pretty good to me on film. It looked pretty good when you read about it, so it must be pretty good. So to each his own.

DOB: Any other people you'd like to talk about? CS: Well . . . no, because they might not like it if I talk about them. [Laughs] DOB: All right. Tell me how you responded, just within yourself, to the long days of summer

where the sun never went down and then followed by the long night of winter. Did this strange season have an effect on you?

CS: No, I just rolled with the punches. Well, here again, I'd been in Alaska for that two

years, so I knew about all that stuff so I was prepared for that. But I took my wife up there, you know, and it was daylight all night. She liked to went nuts of the beauty. Then by the time we were up there four or five months, she had taken many photos, collected wood, canned jam, etc. We met so many wonderful people.

But no, that didn't affect me. Whenever I hit the sack, it didn't make any difference if I was doing it at midnight or if I was doing it at twelve o'clock noon. When I hit the sack, I was ready to sleep and I did. And I still do that to this day. I can go in there and lay down on that bed, and in five minutes I'm sound asleep. And if you wake me up twenty minutes later, I get up and wash my face and I'm ready to do whatever we're going to do.

Not all people were like that. We had the Big Eye Club, you know. Guys used to sit up and watch movies and play cards, and they weren't drinking because we didn't have that much to drink. They just had the Big Eye. They were reading, and we had a


pretty nice music system there. Lieutenant Jorgensen brought down there an Ampex music system, and it was pretty nice. You'd sit out there and listen to records and that. I think that's why Father John put on these programs. He put on some really big ones. We did the Princess Grace wedding and all that. That was [laughs] really something. But that was because they had the Big Eye Club. They couldn't go to sleep, you know. You forget all those things. It really was hard on some of the folks.

DOB: Were you ever truly scared for your life? CS: Most all the time down there I was. I was scared for my life when Commander Canham

and I went down in that little thing. I was scared then and anytime I'm in an airplane. I was scared stupid whenever I was riding down to that South Pole. Every time a little odd noise on an airplane would happen, I thought, oh Lord! Oh God! Yes, sir. I've been scared a lot of times.

Well, I fell in a gully down there at McMurdo when we were still hauling supplies. I had to go over across to another stack of material to look at a number on it, and as it turned out there was a gully. It was fifteen or twenty foot down to the water in that little old thing. It was only about twenty-four inches across, and down I went. I stepped out on the snow and it was a little snow bridge and went through that thing. Fortunately somebody back there, I forget who it was now, seen me fall in there, you know, and he run over there and dropped me down a line. You couldn't even get your elbows right to help you climb back up. I fell down in there twelve, fifteen feet, maybe up to twenty feet. I was way down in there. I could look up there, and it was higher than this ceiling to the top. I don't know who the guy was come over and dropped me a rope down in there and helped me come back up out of there.

That didn't scare me—that just made me mad. But then, you know, everybody began to get antsy because the snow was melting and the creek was running down underneath it which was tearing it off, too. We soon learned to be very careful.

And about that time's when the skua gulls was coming up to make their nest and that—not make their nest. They just dug out some rocks and hatched their little old young'uns up there, and they had freshwater pools that they fooled around in. You know, just swam around in that and preened themselves and that. And that was the same little creek that ran right down through the edge of the camp over there.

I was just in the wrong place at the right time. Several times people stepped in little things, you know. That didn't scare me so bad. It just made me mad that I was dumb enough to step on that snow without looking where I was stepping because I knew better than that. When you're wading across snow, you always watch to see what's around it and if it don't look good, you get your board and put across there.

DOB: Well, what's your best memory from that experience in Antarctica?

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 35 CS: Best memory. Oh, I suppose whenever we'd beat their schedules so bad. They gave us

ninety days, I think it was, to build that Pole base in, and I think we finished it in forty-two or forty-three days. And I really gloated over that. I just thought, boy, those people just didn't have much faith in us at all to think that we couldn't put this puny thing up in less than ninety days. In fact, they didn't think we could do it in ninety days. They was going to give us ninety days, and if it wasn't finished they was going to call all us out anyway. Well, we fooled them jokers. [Laughs] We had time to throw away.

DOB: What's the worst thing that you'd rather not think about that happened? CS: Well, that would've been that tractor caving in with Willie on it. That was my worst

experience down there, losing Willie and that mess. I think almost everything else was just part of the expected thing. Maybe not a standard daily thing that you would think was going to happen, but anything that did happen, you had to take it for what it was worth, and if you weren't prepared for it, then you were in trouble anyway.

But no, I have no—other than Willie caving through the ice, I really don't have any other bad memories of the place at all. I enjoyed the thing, regardless of work or anything else. I truly enjoyed it. In fact, the work is what made it enjoyable, because you didn't have time to sweat about things. At least I didn't. There might've been some guys that did, but I didn't.

DOB: Did you have trouble with morale ever? CS: I suppose the morale was down a little bit here and there, you know. DOB: Yours. CS: Oh, mine? No, I don't think so. You know, sometimes you take an hour and think

about your family or something back home, but we got to talk home—after they got the radio and that up, we got to talk home every two or three months. We got a half hour or so on the radio to talk to our families if they could get a phone patch through, you know. So I got to talk to my family several times. As long as I heard from them that they were doing all right, then I wasn't worried. Without the radio contacts, things could have been worse, though, because we didn't get any correspondence for eight or nine months. Well, maybe it wasn't that long, but several months, and we didn't get any mail. I guess it was probably eight or nine months before we got our first mail. If it hadn't been for getting on that radio once in a while, that would've really been bad because I liked to hear from my family, and I wanted to know how my two older ones were doing in school and that.

I've always really been interested in my family. Even if I was away from them, why my family was still probably the first and foremost thing in my mind, and it is today. I


spend more time on my grandchildren, and I've even got a great-grandson, and I spend as much or more time on them as I did my own, because I love them rascals. And I try to involve them as much as I can. Of course my daughter's children, they're up in their thirties and they're on their own and we don't get to do much with them anymore. But whenever they was growing up, we camped together all the time and water-skied together, and my youngest son's got a ski boat, and there wasn't any spare time that we weren't somewhere doing that with those children.

DOB: Tell me about the food that you had when you were in Antarctica. CS: We had good food. We had good cooks. They could take bad food and make it good.

But we did. We had—we didn't have exotic food, but I'll tell you the food was good. They could make powdered milk taste just like regular milk. After a little while, that's what we had was powdered milk—wasn't a thing wrong with that. All our vegetables came in cans and that, but by the time Upton and that crew got finished doctoring them, they was just like your mama put on the table. [Chuckles] No, we had good food. And at the South Pole all we needed was rice and butter and cinnamon anyway, as far as I was concerned. We had good food at the South Pole, too. Of course by then, ships came back in and we was getting some pretty new stuff. They was flying it up there.

DOB: When the first ship came in in the spring, what were you most eager for that would be on

it? CS: I didn't even care about the ships. It was those airplanes that come in first. That's what

I wanted. They had the mail. So by the time the ships got there, it was just—then the work started again. But by the time the ships got there, I was gone to the South Pole. We got out of there about the time the ships was getting in. No, the ships didn't . . . our ships didn't get in there before we went to the Pole, I don't think. I don't think it got in until we come back from the Pole. I think we were back from the Pole before the ships got in, so I wasn't involved with them. Well, I did help offload some of them. I think I worked out there quite a bit, but I took time off to do whale watching and that stuff, too. But I wasn't responsible for offloading. My relief had come and I was relieved of my responsibility. But I helped him out, you know.

DOB: What do you think about the fact that the military is having less and less of a role on the

ice? CS: Well, it might be a good thing. DOB: Why? CS: Well, they've got other things to do besides that, I think. I think they started out and did

what they should have done, but it's time to release the military from that and let them go on with their military duties. But there's still other people that need to make a living,


too. And I'm sure that it is not going to cost any more for civilians to do it than it does the military to do it. [Chuckles] And besides that, it wouldn't be cutting into military budget.

DOB: When you were there, how much were you aware of world events, politics, and— CS: Not very. We didn't have—well, you know, we had a little newspaper and that, but they

didn't go into that stuff very much. No, we weren't too well informed of what was going on. Either that or we just didn't care. That might be like when I go out camping, I don't watch television, I don't buy the newspaper or listen to the radio. I just go camping and fishing and do my thing. And world politics, I had to come home to find out that we were fixing to get into this thing that we're in now. I didn't even know about it. I'd been gone for two weeks, and I come home and started hearing this stuff about Yugoslavia or wherever it is over there they was doing. "When did this happen?" "Well it's been going on a couple of weeks already, Pop." I said, "Well, it wasn't happening out there on the desert so I didn't hear about it."

DOB: When you were in Antarctica, did you worry very much about the environment? Today,

as you know, they're very, very fussy about garbage and trash and human waste and all of that.

CS: I'm telling you, if we had the environmentalists down there like we got it now, we

wouldn't have got anything done. We did bad things to the environment, I think, and it's kind of a shame some of the things we done. But anyway, I think they paid for that. I think they hauled all that mess back out of there. And I don't know how in the world they ever got to put that nuclear plant in down there, but it didn't last long. They got that out of there, and the dirt's still over here on the base. I drove you right by some of the dirt today.

DOB: That's from there? CS: See that big pile of black dirt there that we went by? That's from Antarctica. DOB: From the nuclear plant. CS: From the nuclear plant. DOB: And they don't worry about it being out here? CS: Well, I think there's a lot of people worried about it. It's been there several years now,

but apparently they didn't ever do anything about it, because there's more of it than that, you see. There's nobody dying from it yet, so I guess there's not much to it. But anyway, it should've not happened.


And some of the things that we done certainly should not have happened. Like we used our latrines and that, and we had them little half oil drums that went in them latrines, and when they got full, they hauled it and dumped it over the cliff. That should have not happened. We were busy with everything then, and we didn't know about—well, we knew about some environmental hazards that we were creating, I'm sure, but I guess they wanted to get to the South Pole so we had to get there the best way we could. I don't think you could go to the South Pole today if you hadn't already been there. I don't think they'd let you do as much as it would cost in environmental things. I don't think they would have let you go far enough with it, or you would still be trying to get there.

DOB: Well, there are a lot of scientists today at the South Pole, more than ever, and there are

tourists in Antarctica. CS: Well, but they've got ways to keep them from screwing up the environmental things

somewhat. But airplane exhaust must do some damage, too. But I guess depending on how much money you've got and what political voices you've got, why some environmental things might not mean much, I don't know. But in California, I tell you they're getting so it's hard to own an automobile in California. Pretty soon we're going to have to get a—you can't have a horse and buggy now because that also is adding an environmental hazard. So I don't know what we're going to do.

DOB: Well, what you set up when you were there in Deep Freeze I helped to build everything that has happened there since, starting with the International Geophysical Year and science that began at that time, and then the Antarctic Treaty which followed in 1959, and for the next forty years, there's been peaceful pursuit of science on the ice.

CS: I'm happy for that. I'm happier to have had a part of it. It was a little bitty part, but I

had a part of it, and I can always say that. I was there when it started. DOB: Do you think that's going to go on indefinitely, all this cooperation? CS: Well, no, there's going to be a squabble about it sooner or later. I have no idea of what's

going to cause it, but every once in a while you hear or read something or other about some of the stuff that's going on. Maybe if we get our military out of there, it'll settle down, because I think Russia and everybody else thinks we're still trying to build military capabilities down there. They certainly have that intent, but we were watching them so close that I don't think they're getting away with anything. If we're watching them, they're bound to be watching us. Maybe if we get out of there and just let our high-flying stuff look down at them and see what they're doing, we can prevent any military establishment down there because they don't need it down there. There's nothing down there to enhance it anyway.

DOB: What if somebody discovered a valuable mineral or something?

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 39 CS: I don't believe they're going to let them do that anyway. Even if they do that, I don't

think anyone's going to know about it but the guy that done it, maybe. There must be minerals down there. How in the world could it become a thing and not have minerals in it? And I imagine that's what everybody's looking for really. You're right. They might start trying to get that out of there. Whenever they do that, then it's going to be some multi-country conflicts. We might have to whip Japan again.

DOB: Let me ask you a question that I've asked everybody, and I've had very interesting

answers. If you were an artist and could paint on one canvas just the essence of your Antarctic experience, what would you put in your painting?

CS: I guess a picture . . . and I took a picture of this and it always stands out in my mind, was

that thing that's up on the pole at the South Pole, that ball that was up there. I was out there taking pictures one day, and there was a sundog appeared right here above that thing just at the right time for my film. And I think that's the best picture I ever took. And that, you know, was just a fluke, but it was a real inspirational thing. It was just like God was up there shining a little light for me to look at, you know. "I'm still up here. Don't forget it, boy. I'm watching out for you. You're going to be all right." That's probably one of the most inspiring things that I seen down there.

But then those mountains and stuff are beautiful with that snow. I mean that Beardmore Glacier is a beautiful thing. I don't want to walk up it, but it is a beautiful thing. And if I could paint, I would paint a picture of that Beardmore Glacier the way I seen it whenever I flew up it going to the South Pole. That was a real interesting thing. That airstrip we put in out there on the ice, that was a very interesting thing.

A lot of people would say sunsets and that, but we never did see any sunsets that amounted to anything, or sunrises either. Sometimes you could see the moon and it was pretty neat. But there was never those real inspirational ones that I ever seen, you know. There might've been some, but I never seen it. I was just not in the right place, I guess, to see that.

Antarctica's a beautiful place. Like I think the desert's a beautiful place. I hear some people say, "What do you see in the desert?" And I say, "It's what you can't see in the desert that's really nice," and it is nice out there. It's the same way I feel about Antarctica. I know Antarctica's got on a white dress, but the white dress is pretty as far as I'm concerned.

And I'd just as soon see it stay like that. I don't really want to see it screwed up like Alaska. I really want Antarctica to stay as near like it is as possible. I don't want to get down there with some machinery and start tearing down mountains and making settlements and all that kind of stuff and fishing up all the fish and melting the ice. I don't want the ice to melt. It would probably fill that ocean up and float California away.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 40 DOB: Paul Siple in his book wrote that "the Antarctic," he said, "generally wields a profound

effect on personality and character, and few people are the same after" they've been there. Do you think that statement is true—

CS: I think that's a pretty true statement. DOB: —and were you changed by your experience? CS: Well, sure you are. DOB: In what way? CS: Well, that you might not be able to lay your finger on. I have a lot more respect for the

environment now that I've been to Antarctica and seeing what it's like, and go to Alaska and see what it's like. I tell you, Alaska is a wrecked place. If they find stuff down there and the treaty don't keep them off of it, Antarctica will be the same way. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing that Alaska is pumping oil and doing these things, because apparently that's what we have to—we either don't have the intelligence or there's too much money in oil firms to do enough research to find something to replace it with. So maybe that's why we need the oil from Alaska. But Alaska's been torn up in a lot of other ways, too—digging gold and all that stuff, and I wouldn't like to see Antarctica get like that.

So it has changed my thinking. When I was growing up in that, I thought, if it's there dig it up. But I don't feel like that anymore. Maybe that's one of the things that Paul was trying to say, too.

DOB: Well, my last question for you is this. What haven't I asked you that you wish I had? CS: Well, I probably didn't cover half the things that I should've covered, and you probably

didn't ask me all the questions that you should've asked me. But I think we got a pretty good picture of what I done, so I don't believe you needed to ask me anything else. You've already asked if I wanted to go back and I don't want to go back. I want to keep all the people out of there I can.

DOB: Even yourself. Thank you so much for talking with me. It's been a pleasure. CS: You betcha. It's been my pleasure, Dian. I'm sorry I'm not a little better educated so I

could answer you better, but I told you as near as I can how I felt about it. DOB: You did a great job. Thank you. CS: You're welcome.

Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 41 [End of interview]

Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with

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