Oral History Interview with Ben Blaz, October 8, 1994 Page: 47
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than me were girls. I was the natural heir or the
natural guy to assume the responsibility. It's just
done that way, you know, if anything should happen to
my father. But there was never a time before then
where my father had in any way at all indicated that I
had even come close to being ready. It was expected in
your eighteenth summer, but I was only thirteen.
So due to the compression of time and the amount
of time we spent working together, I learned more in
the three years of the war about human relationships
and the realities of life than I did in the thirty
years that followed that academically. Oh, I learned
chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, and all that.
That's fine. But when it comes to dealing with people
and understanding them, I think it [my experience
during World War II] really has served me well. It has
erased the bitterness that, I think, was in it [the
war]. The memory of the war--of that period in which I
was spending so much time with my father and my mother
and sisters and brothers going through the jungle;
getting your own water from the river and drinking itright out of the river, and so on and so forth--it just
seems such a beautiful part of my life that I can see
to this day.
You take this piece of bamboo--maybe twenty-feet
long sections. You take a smaller bamboo, and you47
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Blaz, Ben. Oral History Interview with Ben Blaz, October 8, 1994, text, October 8, 1994; Fredericksburg, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1606451/m1/49/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting National Museum of the Pacific War/Admiral Nimitz Foundation.