Music

Achtung Achtung and welcome to another episode of our Thanksgiving US podcast specials of

We Have Ways.

I'm James Holland and today I'm talking to Veteran Bob Pashetti who is a veteran of the USS

El Dorado. He was a radio man served out in the Pacific during the time of the battles

of Iwo Gima and Okenawa and he had an amazing story. Anyway he's based in Rochester in

New York so this interview was conducted over Zoom which was pretty impressive for a

98 year old I've got to say and as with all my interviews with Veterans I started by

asking him about his childhood. I hope you enjoy it.

I was born in a telemet Pennsylvania it's a little coal mining town in southwestern

Pennsylvania. My dad was a coal miner and we moved from mind to mind whenever there

was work and so I ended up in a little community called Leamont Furnace but I was born in April

4th, April 7th, 1922. I grew up in these mining towns until 1942 joined the Navy and

was sent to Bainbridge, Maryland and took my boot camp there and it was a new camp that

was built and in fact it was a mess because they had hardly anything complete but the

mess hall in the barracks and so we only stayed there about six weeks I guess normally was

eight weeks but we had no drill hall, we had no swimming pools, we had nothing hardly to

work on and so they processed our IQs and whatever and they sent me to radio school in New

York City. I spent 16 weeks in New York City going to radio school. After 16 weeks if you

were able to pass the test of 16 words a minute you were...

This is on Morse code is it? Yes, Morse code that's right. We did Morse code and theory and

if you passed 16 words a minute the last two weeks then you were in as a leg in apprentice.

...