OFF SCREEN: You held several different roles while you were at that camp. Would you like to talk about those?

JAMES: Well, I think the first job was working in the company's store, which was at the end of our barracks.

It was a small area about, maybe, ten feet wide, then the width of the barracks.

All the merchandise that they wanted to buy was in there like shaving cream and all this.

Incidentally—I'll jump back again—but when I was assistant education advisor, we had a class, and my assignment was to teach these guys to read.

Well, I was nineteen, maybe, and I didn't have a book. All I had was a piece of chalk and a blackboard.

So I tried my best to teach these guys to read, but they just kind of, they quit coming to class. They didn't want to learn to read.

So I was down in the bath house one day—I think I was shaving—and they had a long counter.

The guy next to me said—he started to brush his teeth and he said, "Damn. This stuff you sold me is lousy toothpaste." I said, "Let me see it." And I looked at it and it was Colgate shaving cream in a tube. And I realized then that this guy couldn't read.

He bought that at the store. I had given him shaving cream instead of toothpaste.

But then on to the jobs. The first job, which seemed real nice, was running this company store, after I'd been working out in the park for a couple, three months.

They looked through your records and said, "Let's get this guy in here. We ought to be able to use him. He's been to college." So I worked in the company store.

And that lasted quite a while. I had to open it up in the evening about when the guys all came in from work.

They'd shower and then come down to the store in the recreation building. And I ran this thing for a while.

I couldn't check up. I kept coming up short. Cigarettes then were—I think they were twenty cents a carton, something like that.

And I was short all the time, and my officer who was in charge of me would come in with friends and sit around and drink cold drinks.

I thought maybe that's where it goes. But he decided he didn't want me in there any more because I couldn't check up at the end of the month.

So I went back out to the road to handle a shovel again, just digging dirt and moving rocks.