Bob Facincani, Korean War Veteran and High School Teacher

Butte High School

Oral History Transcript of Bob Facincani

Interviewers: Clark Grant and Aubrey Jaap
Interview Date: March 1st, 2018
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: August 2019 by Adrian Kien

Bob Facincani: Robert Facincani. My friends call me Bob. F-A-C-I-N-C-A-N-I.

Clark Grant: Very good. Thank you. This conversation is basically just an oral history of your life. Usually, we start at the beginning. Where were you born?

Facincani: I was born in Butte. 1929. March 26th.

Grant: What are some of your earliest memories in Butte?

Facincani: My earliest memories? Well, there used to be an old mine dump across the street from my house. We used to climb up on the dump and play. I can spot the first playground I can remember. It was in my backyard. 222 East Mercury Street. It used to be the fire station, but it’s somebody’s pawn shop now. I was born in the house behind it.

Grant: Born in the house? And to a big family?

Facincani: Yes, I had two brothers and a sister older than me. Three sisters younger than me. I was the middle one.

Grant: That is a big family. Were you guys religious?

Facincani: My mother was and she tried to make us. I’m sorry but I kind of drifted away. We went to church regularly. And I did my communion, but as I got older I sort of drifted away.

Grant: And the neighborhood in general? What was it like?

Facincani: It was kind of a modest neighborhood. South of us was a place called the Cabbage Patch. There were some really old house down there. That’s where the Silver Bow homes are now. We had friends all over the neighborhood there. The Silver Bow homes were built in 1942 or something like that.

Grant: As a kid, other than playing on mine dumps, would you play in the streets or walk around uptown?

Facincani: Oh we played in the streets. In the wintertime we had ice skating rinks. But there were no playgrounds as such around. We had to improvise. Some of the things I suppose we did were kind of foolish, playing on the mine dump for one thing. On top of the dump it was flat. We used to go up there and fly kites when I was a little older. A watchman used to come and chase us off because there were still blasting caps and stuff around there and he didn’t want us to get killed. And we didn’t, so . . . We had a good time trying to evade him.

Grant: Butte in the ’30’s. The late ’30’s. Would you describe it as busy all the time?

Facincani: Oh it was really busy. Then came the Depression. And then the mines shutdown and things were not. I guess we were all poor, but we didn’t know it because everybody else was too.

Grant: How did that effect the household? Did things change?

Facincani: I suppose. My father was out of work, of course. Then he worked for the WPA and that sort of thing. We got along. I suppose they worried about us. We were kids; we didn’t care. We had plenty to eat and places to sleep.

Grant: What did your dad do before?

Facincani: He was a miner.

Grant: And he was underground?

Facincani: Yes, he was. He was born in Italy. The family migrated to South America and then that was when there were restrictions on coming to the United States, but Brazil, anybody could go, I guess. My father was raised there. In the early 1900’s they started the Panama Canal and they come through looking for laborers. Him and his friend said, What the Hell. They jumped on a boat and went to Panama. He worked on the Canal and people working on the Canal, a lot them said come to the United States if they wanted to, except because of the restrictions. They came to the United States. He was working in a mine in Vermont, a talc mine. He got a job there. They heard that in Butte, Montana they were paying five dollars a day for labor which was outstanding money in those days. They jumped on a freight train and came to Butte and here I am.

But things were going good. Mining was a dangerous occupation, but it paid well for the time. He and a couple of his friends went out on their own. They had a claim in Hecla, MT, southwest of Melrose. They had a claim there. This was before I was born. I guess they moved back into Butte.

If you ask questions, I can answer them. I told my friends, if I didn’t know anything, I’d make it up.

Grant: The claim didn’t pan out?

Facincani: Oh yeah, they did alright. But, the thing was silver and the price of silver went down. He came to Butte. I guess he was a pretty good miner. He was a contract miner. They were paid for how much they got out - how many holes they drilled and how much they blasted and so on. He did quite well for a while and then the Depression started. That lasted for most of the ’30’s. But we did well. They had surplus food. They bought food from the farmers and stuff. Next door was the VFW and there was a store there. They gave away food and clothing and so on. We lived right next door so we did alright getting stuff. We were on welfare, but we didn’t know it. They used to give away food there. My mother, they had like lard and flour and stuff, she’d make doughnuts and bring them over to the people that worked there. They’d say tomorrow morning we’re going to get new clothes or special something. So early in the morning my sister, she was two years younger than I am, she would go and get dressed and run over there and get in line. First one in line. She’d stay there and I’d get ready for school and then I would take her place in line. My mother would come over when everybody was ready for school and get in line. So we did pretty well. We had plenty to eat. In fact, my father said, “We used to have better food when we were on the Depression than I do now that I’m working.”

That’s when he went back to work. He said, “We used to have hot cocoa and dunk marshmallows in it. We don’t get that anymore.” It was bad, but we survived. He worked up in Homestake. There’s a quarry up there. If you look at Montana Tech, that side of the hill that’s all held up with granite rocks, that’s from the quarry. He worked out there with the WPA. They built sidewalks and curbings. There used to be a place, it’s gone now, there was a place called the Broadway Rink on East Broadway. They had a hillside it was all, it’s called rip-rap. You get tons and tons of rock. I’ve tried to find where the quarry was, but I’ve never found where it’s at. He was a good miner and he worked very well.

Grant: What mines did he work in?

Facincani: He worked in almost all over them. He worked in the Mountain Con. The Belmont was just down the street from us. He used to walk to work down there. He worked in almost all of them.

Grant: Did he ever come home and talk about work?

Facincani: Sometimes, but not a lot. We didn’t understand the technicalities of mining. He didn’t talk too much about it.

Grant: Any idea how your mom and dad met?

Facincani: You know; I really don’t know.

Grant: It was here in Butte?

Facincani: I think she was a waitress in a boarding house and he went there. All the miners went there to eat and I guess they met there. Their love life was a secret to us. We were not a very expressive family. There was not much hugging and kissing. I guess there must have been something going on, because there were seven of us.

Jaap: What were your parents’ names?

Facincani: His name was Gaetano. Her name was Josephine.

Grant: Her maiden name?

Facincani: Her maiden name was Rufatto. When our son was born, I wanted to name him Gaetano, but my wife didn’t think it would be too good of an idea. But when he got older, he said, “Why didn’t you? I think it would be kind of neat if I had that name.” I said, “Yeah, but in school you would have been picked on for being Gaetano.”

Grant: What about your mother’s family? Did she immigrate from Italy?

Facincani: Her mother came over. I don’t know exactly what year. Her mother was from the Genoa area in Italy. Her husband came over. Her first. He was working in Butte. She came over with her kids. My mother’s older brother. They were in Hibbing, MN where the iron mines are. She was born in Hibbing, MN. 1894, I think, around there. We were a good family. We loved one another, but we didn’t express too much. My wife didn’t understand why there wasn’t no hugging and kissing. Because her family, that’s all they did. She said it was kind of cold. But I said that’s the way it was.

I remember, this is kind of off the subject, my mother was in the hospital. My father came to see her and we were there. I was 5 or 6 years old. I don’t remember how old I was. My father, he went to kiss my mother and she said, “No, no, not with the kids here.” She didn’t think that was right to display that sort of thing. Things are kind of different nowadays.

Grant: In your high school days, did you go to Butte High?

Facincani: I went to Butte High. I went to the Grant Grade School which is gone. I went to Butte High. I graduated in the class of ’46. We had our 70th reunion a couple of years ago. I didn’t go, but I imagine there were only about four people there.

Grant: Your grade school is gone.

Facincani: On East Galena Street. It’s gone now.

Grant: A lot of buildings.

Facincani: Oh yeah, that whole area there from Arizona Street to the East. They’re all gone. The pit was coming that way. They didn’t think it would come that far, but it did. I used to have a paper route in that area when I was a boy. All the houses I delivered to are gone.

Grant: How long did you deliver the paper?

Facincani: A couple of years. It was the Butte Daily Post in those days. It was printed only five days. They didn’t have a Sunday paper.

Grant: Do you have any thoughts or feelings on that? That all of those buildings are gone?

Facincani: Yeah, I feel bad sometimes. My friends used to live there. It’s all different. You know what it looks like now. Where the pit is, it was all houses and stuff there. I guess that’s progress. I don’t know. That’s what everybody says.

Grant: Was there much protest?

Facincani: About what?

Grant: The expansion of the pit.

Facincani: Not too much. The Company. They paid a good price for the people’s house. And if you wanted the house, you could buy it back for a dollar and they moved it where you wanted. A lot of the houses on the flat were moved down there. But people were sad to leave their neighborhood. Can I digress and just rattle on?

Grant: Yes, please do.

Facincani: I had a teacher in high school and they lived on the East Side. They had a house down there on East Mercury Street some place. They gave her a house on the flat and I asked her if she was sad moving. She said, “Oh no, we got a great house now, we just had a shack before.”

Jaap: I think the hardest part was that people lost their community.

Facincani: Meaderville wasn’t exactly a fancy community, but everybody that lived there just loved it. My wife was born there in Meaderville.

Grant: Did you spend much time there?

Facincani: In your early twenties you go out. On Saturday night we’d go to Meaderville and stay out all night long enjoying festivities until early morning. I got married again. My first wife . . . I don’t need to tell you about that. I was 60 years old and she was 40 something. We had a child. I started to go somewhere with this and then I lost it.

Grant: We were talking about Meaderville.

Facincani: Just a minute.

Grant: Never having seen Meaderville and now I never can.

Facincani: My son. He’s 28 or so. When he was born, we were a little older than people usually are. I had something to say about it, but now it’s gone.

Grant: It’ll come back to you. I was curious if on a Saturday night, when you went to Meaderville and you were to walk through it, what does it look like?

Facincani: Oh there were eight or ten bars down there. They had music. We, young people liked to go down there drinking and dancing.

When I was 20 and my son is 28 years old. When he was like 22, that was when I was in my prime of being a gay blade. I said, if he does the things I did, I’m going to be kind of worried about him. I never got into any real trouble, but when you’re out . . . That’s part of the growing up thing. Coming of age.

Grant: What were some of the things that you did, that if he did, you’d be worried about him?

Facincani: Drinking. It was just the thing to do on a Saturday night. We never got in any trouble. We never got into fights or anything. Just having a good time, supposedly. It was OK.

Grant: Did you have favorite bars back in the day?

Facincani: Do you know where the Met bar is. My father told me one time, why don’t you just get your mail there. You’re always out there. We used to spend a lot of time out there shooting pool and playing pinochle.

Grant: This was when you were in your 20’s?

Facincani: I graduated high school in ’46. I got a couple of jobs, but my friend and I got a job at the smelter. I worked there for years just as a day laborer. It was a good job. It paid well. I was working at the bricklayers. It was hard work. I was big and strong in those days. I could push a whole wheelbarrow full of bricks and now I can’t even pick up two bricks without puffing. But it was interesting. We had a good time growing up. Then the Korean War came and I got drafted. I spent some time in Korea. I was never involved in any battles. I was a field telephone wireman. I got stationed at a hospital in Korea. The Japanese had been in charge of Korea for years in the ’20’s and ’10’s. They built this big hospital. It was big and long and rambling building. It was like most of things you see on Mash with the tents, but this was a building. It wasn’t bad living there. They didn’t have any place for a telephone person at first so they gave me training to be a corpsman. For one afternoon they gave me training to take blood pressure, feel pulses and things, and that was all the training I had as a medic. But I learned a lot of stuff there.

The nurses came in in the morning to take care of the patients. The guys were pretty well shot up. The first day I was there, she said, “We are going to do these patients.” She had a can or a canister with a lid on it with bandages in there. I took the lid off and I stuck it down this way. She said, “Where did you learn that [antiseptic care]? You can’t set it down that way. You get germs on it.” She said, “Where did you have your training?” I said, “Just down the hall there. Some sergeant gave me about 20 minutes of antiseptic care.” I get carried away when I start telling my war stories.

Grant: Thank you for sharing.

Facincani: I was working quite a while in the wards taking care of people. One night we had this guy that had to have an enema. I’d never done one and the other guy hadn’t either. We did the best we could. It was not too nice. The next day they had a thing asking for people to volunteer to be on guard duty. I was the first one in line. I would rather be shot at than have somebody crap at me. If you don’t mind, I’d rather be shot at than shit at. So I spent some time on guard duty and then the other guy got sent home and I got put on communications duty. We ran the switchboard and took care of all the phones in the building. I did that for the rest of the year while I was there. I was there for a year. The service was for one year. Like it is now.

Grant: What was your feeling when you were drafted? Did it come in the mail, the draft?

Facincani: The war started in June of ’51. They started drafting right away. I wasn’t drafted until January of ’52. A lot of my friends had already been drafted. Actually, I thought it would be kind of nice to get away from the smelter. My friends thought I was crazy being happy in the army. It wasn’t that terrible. When I got discharged, they had the GI Bill in those days and you could go to college. So a friend of mine in the service who was from Montana too said, “Let’s go to Missoula and we’ll get in the education department. You don’t have to do anything there and it’s not too hard. And we’ll have a good time.” I thought that was alright, but I didn’t go to Missoula. I went to Western in Dillon. I got a degree and I got a job, first at the junior high and then I got onto the high school, Butte High. I started there in 1957 and I was there until 1990. I taught German and I was a librarian. I learned German in college. It was a great job. It was a lot better than pushing wheel barrows full of bricks.

Grant: I would like to hear more about working at the smelter, because, again, that’s something that shutdown long before I came around.

Facincani: It was a busy place. The Anaconda survived on it, of course. It was not a very healthy place to work. They had furnaces there. I was with the bricklayers and the furnaces were lined with bricks and when they shut down you had to go in there with a respirator and all kinds of gauze around your neck. It wasn’t a very healthy place to work. When teaching seemed terrible, I just thought about being back at Roaster 2 and it didn’t seem so bad after all. But I was there for several years until I got drafted and I didn’t want to go back there.

Grant: What was it like when the stack was really going? When the smelter was running.

Facincani: The furnace parts were really interesting. They actually melted the ore. It was hot. I had to work there one time. They dumped the stuff out of these converters into the ladles and then hauled them down to the refining place. I had a job underneath the ladles, poking up the ladles so the crane operator could get on the other end and dump it. It was kind of scary looking up at this ladle full of molten copper. Every once in a while they had spills. And if there was water on the floor, it would explode. A lot of people got burned this way. It didn’t happen too often, but it was kind of scary being in there.

Grant: Did you ever see injuries like that?

Facincani: Thankfully, I didn’t.

Grant: Who got you that job?

Facincani: I did. They had a place, a hiring hall. A friend and I didn’t want to work in the mines. My father told me if I could help it, to keep out. It wasn’t much better at the smelter, I don’t think. We just went down there. They were hiring a bunch of folks at the time and we got jobs. It was an interesting place. Where they round up the ore and stuff. All kinds of machines running. We mostly did the repairing work. The bricklaying. Putting cement in and stuff like that. The actual smelting, I didn’t have much to do with it.

Grant: My understanding is that the Anaconda Company had total dominance over this whole area.

Facincani: They ran the state.

Grant: That was your impression at the time?

Facincani: We didn’t talk much about it. There wasn’t much to do about it. They ran the state, at least this part of the state. The Anaconda Company, they ran it. They elected whoever they wanted and that sort of thing. They paid well. And it was a good, decent job. I guess that’s the way things were in those days. In Maryland, DuPont ran the state, or Delaware. In Detroit, Ford Motor Company told the people what to do. And the Anaconda Company did it here in Montana.

Grant: Was your position union?

Facincani: Oh yes. In fact, the teacher’s union, when I was a teacher. You didn’t have to join the union, but everybody did. I got into it. They asked me one time when I was there, would I like to become an officer in the union? I said, “Probably.” They started me out as Vice President. A lot of people didn’t want the job. I stayed there a long time. I became president of the Union for a while. Then I was treasurer. Then I was head of the negotiating committee for a time. I was very active in the union. People nowadays think that Social Security and all the things that we have, that companies gave it to us out of the goodness of their heart, but they were all fought for. We went on strike several times to get things. The mines went on strike. Teachers went on a strike a couple times. In the mines, all the safety devices and things, they were brought because of unions. The salaries, the vacations, all of them come from unions. We talk to kids nowadays and they think the companies were just good at heart, but we fought for it.

Grant: Can you talk a little about those negotiations. How did they go?

Facincani: They never have enough money to pay teachers. You see it today in West Virginia where the teachers went on strike. We spent many hours with the school board. The people on the school board, most of them are nice people. They’re restricted too. They didn’t have tons of money to give to us. But we managed, we got pretty good raises from time to time. But we had to fight for them. We had to negotiate for them. I can remember going to meetings in the evenings and we were there until 4 o’clock in the morning, arguing and fighting, but it was, I don’t regret it, it was very educational. My wife, my second wife, she was a teacher too. That’s how we met, talking in the hallways.

She became secretary and then she was president of the union too, for a while. We were quite active in it. It was a good part of my life, I think. Teaching, I enjoyed that. It was a job that I didn’t mind going to. The smelter, it’s altogether different going to work. I was a librarian. A friend of mine said that if there was reincarnation, he wanted to be reincarnated as a librarian.

Grant: What is it that you enjoyed about teaching?

Facincani: Being with the kids. Being able to help them. Made a lot of good friends with the teachers. It was a nice community of teachers we had there.

Grant: How many students would you say you had over the years? Can you estimate?

Facincani: I don’t know. We had classes of 30. I taught German for a long time and then I became a librarian. 30 kids, five periods a day, for 30 years. I even meet people. I kid people, I meet people and they say, “You don’t remember me, do you Mr. Facincani?” I says, “No.” This guy talking to me. There’s a man there. He’s about 60 years old with a beard and a big belly. I says, “When I taught you, you were 16 years old and you didn’t look anything like you do now.” That’s why I don’t remember.

Grant: Do you still go to the Met?

Facincani: No. That part of my life is over with. I have a glass of wine with dinner now and again. If I don’t drink anymore, I had my share.

Grant: Why German?

Facincani: It’s crazy. I went to Western. I wanted to learn something I didn’t know. I wanted to take French, but they didn’t teach French there. They taught German. I enjoyed every minute of that. When Sputnik went up, they had this thing in the government to teach people to learn things to help get us in competition with them. So they had these college courses where you could go to and the government paid for them and they had institutions in language. So I went to the University of Seattle and into this German institute. And I leaned quite a bit there. In fact, most of my German that I can remember was from there.

Grant: Did you ever go to Germany?

Facincani: Oh yes. I went there once. And I was able to get us around and ask where the hotel was and what time the train left.

Grant: And when was that?

Facincani: 1996. I remember because that was our 50th class anniversary and I didn’t get to go to it because I was over in Europe.

Grant: So you didn’t make the 50th reunion or the 70th? Did you make the 60th?

Facincani: I never went to any reunions. I wasn’t into it. My wife liked to go to them, but I never did.

Grant: I’ve never been to one of mine either.

Facincani: My personal life - I was married. I got married in 1954. My wife and I had two boys. In fact, one boy is 60 years old this year. We’re going to celebrate his birthday together. And another boy, he lives in Seattle. My eldest son lives in Rhode Island (from the first wife). He’s a state librarian there. My youngest son was born from my second wife. He’s in New Orleans. So I have them in all corners of this country, we have children. But he’s, they call him, like you are, archivist. Another fancy name for a librarian. He’s working in Tulane University. I think that’s neat my one son is a librarian in Rhode Island. He’s down there in New Orleans, archiving.

Grant: The one in Seattle?

Facincani: He works for TSA. He started out as a teacher and he didn’t want to do it anymore. He’s getting people on and off airplanes and making them mad at him.

Grant: So it seems like your children are all doing well.

Facincani: Oh yes. We’re happy with them. I tried to be as good of a father as I could.

Grant: Were there any particular lessons that you learned from your father that you tried to pass onto your sons?

Facincani: Work hard. He had a real good work ethic. If you get a job, you work at it. They pay you to work. And you work, you know. He said a lot of people when they get a job, they flop off and do the least as they can. He said, “You don’t do that. You work.” He couldn’t speak English too well. But he knew what was right.

Grant: So did you speak Italian in your home ever?

Facincani: My grandmother lived with us and she spoke Italian all the time. But we answered her in English. That bothers me now. I should have talked to her. But we could understand everything she said. And then when we went to Italy on that same trip. I was able to get around there with some of the Italian that I knew.

Grant: So is that your mom’s mother that lived with you?

Facincani: Yes. My mother’s mother. In those days, her husband died and they had nothing like they have nowadays. No Medicare or anything. She lived with us as long as I can remember until she died. But I can remember back to when she was there. But she used to tell me stories about working in Italy. Mostly in Italian. She tried to speak English. She learned to read a little bit. We’d go to the library and she liked kind of like children’s books. She said bring me a book with big print in it. She didn’t care what it was about as long as the print was big.

Grant: I’m curious a little bit more about Korea. Was it cold while you were there?

Facincani: As cold as I’ve ever been in my life was when I was there. The humidity was very high. It’d be like 20 degrees and it was just so cold you couldn’t stand it almost. We’d have to be out on guard duty. We’d put on long underwear and two pair of pants and three coats and we’d still be cold. If someone would have shot at you, the bullet couldn’t have gotten through to kill us. Then coming back, they put us in this. . . leaving to get on a boat to come back to the U.S., they put us in this big facility. It was like a barracks or whatever it was. They had a stove about as big as one of these chairs. It was so cold in there, it’s a wonder we all didn’t die. But at the hospital where I was stationed at, we had very good facilities there. The cooks were all good cooks. It wasn’t bad. I made some good friends there.

Grant: Was it hard to see these guys coming in wounded?

Facincani: Oh yes. It was terrible.

Grant: I bet.

Facincani: For a while our hospital became a . . . they had a thing called the Korean Service Corps. They were civilians who worked with the Army. They brought munitions up to the front. They brought food and did kind of labor and things. They were up in the battle areas and they’d get shot up too. These Korea Service people. That was all that was in the hospital was these Korean Service Corps people. I learned a few words of Korea even with them people around.

Grant: Do you remember any?

Facincani: Yeah, I know how to say, “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

Grant: How do you say it?

Facincani: [Speaks Korean] We were in the switchboard, telephone switchboard area. Next door was the x-ray. I used to go over and talk to the people and be friendly with them. They’d x-ray the people and they’d say, “Take a deep breath and hold it.” It’s kind of funny. We were in Seattle about six months ago. These Korean people were in the same restaurant and were in the same motel. I got to talking to them and I said I was over in Korea during the war. They said thank you for being over there and chasing the communists away. I told them that I learned a couple of words and said it to them. And they said, “Oh yeah, it doesn’t mean exactly that. It means, stand still and don’t move.” I said, “Ok.” He took my picture and said he was going to send it to me, but he never did. It’s interesting that something that I learned would help me to be sociable.

Grant: I’m curious to hear more about Butte itself, like while you were high school and before you left for Korea. What did you do in Uptown? It was before the pit so there was so much more here. I think the pit began in the early 50’s, but you graduated in ’46. So what was that period of time like for you? Before you were out boozing.

Facincani: I keep telling people that I lived a very uneventful life. In high school, I never took part in anything. In fact, when I graduated, they wondered where I came from. I was in the second grade. Before I went to school, my sister was older than I was. She taught me how to read before I went to school. So when I got to school, I was way ahead of the other kids. They gave me a special promotion and I skipped the second grade. At the time it seemed like a wonderful thing, but it was terrible. Because I was always a year or more younger than everybody else in class. In high school, the other kids were out doing things, and I was at home playing in the sandbox with my trucks. So I didn’t feel like I belonged to the group, with the other kids. Because they were doing things. High school kids do a lot of drinking, but I never did that in high school. I came home.

Like I said, I was almost a non-entity. But I enjoyed myself. Reading has been a thing in my life and all I did was read. I learned a few things. I didn’t take part in the normal high school activities. I wasn’t on the football team. I didn’t go out for track. I didn’t get on the drama club. I went to class and went home.

Grant: Did you ever go out to theaters uptown?

Facincani: See that’s something else I never did too. All the high school guys had girlfriends. I never did. I think I was kind of afraid of girls at the time. Still am. That’s why I never went. I never dated in high school. I probably missed something out that I should have. Part of my coming of age sort of thing. I think I still turned out alright.

Grant: What about favorite works of literature? Do you have favorite books?

Facincani: When I was in high school I loved mystery stories. Ellery Queen was just a fantastic writer for me. And then in college I got interested in English literature. And I read most of that, you know, Dickens, Thackeray and all of that. I enjoyed that kind of classic period of literature. I still do.

Grant: And life in Dillon? Was it equally uneventful?

Facincani: Well I got married. I was a year in school, living there in the dorms. And I got married. She came down. I had a job as a fry cook in the kitchen, I guess. With the job, I got an apartment. So we lived there for three years. It wasn’t too bad. A very nice apartment. We enjoyed married life. It was kind of frugal living because I got paid a little bit from the school for my job in the kitchen. And the GI bill paid for my school. And my wife got a part-time job. So we weren’t too bad. We got to go to the movies maybe twice a month. But things worked out well. I got a good job. I think everybody should go through a frugal period of time.

Grant: I’m stuck in one.

Jaap: Frugal period. That’s a nice way of putting it.

Facincani: When we were in school, sometimes we had to economize on the food we bought. Once a month maybe we’d go buy a steak and that was just a big party for us. So when we got out and started working, we started enjoying going out and eating properly and going to the movies whenever we wanted to.

Grant: Did you have favorite restaurants when you were able to go out?

Facincani: Oh yeah. We have Lydia’s still. That’s still going. We just went to every place in town. We didn’t have anything special, but we went to Lydia’s when we were celebrating.

Grant: Did you all return to Butte right after school?

Facincani: Except for the time in the Service and my time in college, I spent all my life here. I think it’s great. We sometimes wonder if it would be nice to live in San Diego or something. With the days like today when you’re freezing and falling down on the ice. But I enjoy living here. I think the people are great here. Are you from Butte?

Grant: I’m not from here, but I love living here.

Facincani: It’s a great place.

Grant: What about in the 1960’s. I don’t know much about Butte in that period of time? What was going on that was big then?

Facincani: That’s when the pit was really going on. I don’t know. I went to work and I went home. I wasn’t out and about a bunch. The pit was running. The smelter in the Anaconda was going. Work conditions were pretty good here.

Jaap: You started teaching in ’57. There were some big strikes during that time. The miner strikes. Did that affect the kids? Did you notice that?

Facincani: No. Nothing stands out. I’m sure that in their home life there were problems, but they didn’t show up at school. We had some terrible strikes here in Butte. 1946 was a terrible strike. Some of the guys, they crossed the picket line and went to work. The guys who didn’t got really mad. Several houses got destroyed. They went around and tore down the houses of some of these people. Scabs that crossed the picket line. My brother was a mining engineer. He worked for the company and he didn’t want to cross the picket line and they wouldn’t hire him back again. So he finally got a job, but he didn’t rise up the company like he could have, because he thought more about unionism than some people did.

Grant: Was that for fear of his house being ransacked?

Facincani: My father was a very strong union man. He wasn’t in any office or anything, but he believed in the union. And he instilled that in us. I think one of the most proud things he ever thought about me was that I was president of the teachers’ union.

Grant: What about the teacher strikes?

Facincani: They were nothing. No houses were destroyed. But a lot of the teachers, some of them, thought that it was terrible for us to go out on strike. One of the teachers we were trying to convince said, “What will my friends think of me, if I go out on strike?” I said, “What will we think of you, if you don’t?” But we got through them. Like I said, the negotiating was kind of fun in a way. But it was hard work.

Grant: Was it MEA-MFT at that time?

Facincani: American Federation of Teachers. The MEA. They were our enemy sort of. They didn’t believe some of the things we did. But we got together and everything worked out fine.

Grant: That’s a big union nowadays.

Facincani: The AFT is. They don’t have the power that they used to have. None of the unions do. That’s a terrible thing. The unions are nothing now compared to what they used to be. I shouldn’t make speeches about it, but when Regan fired all of the traffic controllers and hired back people, every union in the country should have gone on strike. Everyone. That’s my opinion. If they had of, then a lot of things would be different. It isn’t Regan’s fault, he did what he thought was right, I guess. My politics are . . . My father would kill me if I voted Republican. And then I shouldn’t go into what’s going on today.

Grant: Would you care to?

Facincani: No.

Grant: It’s grim.

Facincani: Yeah, I know. People were surprised yesterday that Trump actually said something that made sense. Did you see that?

Grant: About?

Facincani: Guns. That they pass these laws and then take the guns away. But they should take the guns and then take the people to court. And even Steven Colbert said, “I can’t believe, it’s the same man.”

Grant: It’s hard to tell what he’s going to do next.

Facincani: He’s got his own agenda. But I didn’t come here to talk about Trump.

Grant: Is there anything that you would like to see happen in Butte? In the coming years.

Facincani: I’d like to see some industry come in here that could hire maybe a few thousand people and bring the town back to the way it was that I remember. When things were booming. You go up town on Saturday night and there was people all over the street. Well, not over the street, but walking around. It was just a great community. Now it seems to be . . . it can’t be like it was. But if we could have something here that would hire people and bring people in.

Grant: Does it sadden you to walk around in Uptown?

Facincani: Yes, it is. You come out of the theater or movie at night and there’s nobody on the streets. When the town was booming and the mines were really, really going, there was always somebody uptown, walking around, doing something. Now, the town is like a ghost town. You’ve seen that too. That makes me feel bad. You look at the old pictures of people in parades and there were thousands and thousands of people on the street. Now you have a parade and get a few people but . . . And then seeing the Columbia Gardens disappear. That was a very tragic thing in our life. My wife used to work out there selling tickets on the merry-go-round. She feels bad to look up there and see a big hole in the ground. You don’t remember the Columbia Gardens at all, of course.

Jaap: I was not born here but spent most of my life here.

Facincani: I think we have a good community here. I don’t know, it seems different from other towns. Used to be that Butte was one of the toughest towns in the country. I forget where I read it, years ago. One of the toughest towns in the United States is Laredo, Texas and Butte, Montana. The FBI used to send people here to punish them. Did you hear that?

Grant: The agents were sent here?

Facincani: Yeah, if you did something bad, you were sent to Butte. Well, my son had an education class at the high school at one time and people from different occupations came and talked to the class. He was talking to the FBI guy because he thought maybe he’d like to do that someday. He said, “Well, do they still send people to Butte when they did something bad?” He said, “No, they send them to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”

Grant: Oh, OK. Did you go out to the Gardens a lot?

Facincani: Oh yes. They used to have on Thursdays Garden Days. They had street cars in those days. On Thursdays they had these open street cars that kids rode for free out to the Gardens. We used to go over every Thursday. In fact, nowadays, I say to my wife, “It’s Thursday; let’s go to the Gardens.” My sister, she was older than us, and she had to take care of us siblings. But we all had a good time. My mother would make lunch for us. That’s when they had that surplus food from the government. It was canned beef. It wasn’t the greatest thing in the world. My mother made pasties out of them. She doctored them up, of course. I remember taking pasties to the Garden on Thursday. That’s one of my favorite memories. But it was such a great time out there. There’d be thousands of kids out there all having a good time. That’s one of the saddest things. I’m crying now thinking about it.

Grant: What does it mean to crack the bars?

Facincani: That was on the cowboy swings. I think they still have them at Clark’s Park, don’t they? You get the thing going so high that the bar that the thing is hanging on would clank together. Out at the Gardens, they used to have, they were mostly teachers and they’d supervise, and if they weren’t looking we’d could do that, you know, get the thing going. Of course, it was kind of dangerous.

Jaap: Do you remember Mrs. Meanie? Did you guys call her Mrs. Meanie?

Facincani: Probably something different.

[All laugh]

Grant: Was that Zorca?

Facincani: Yeah, my wife talks about her. My wife worked out there and she knew her. What was the funny paper the other day? I think it was, but it was about playgrounds. Well, there’s one about the old people, what’s it called? Anyway, their son is out at the garden. The guy says, they took down the swing because they were dangerous. They took down the teeter totter because it was dangerous. The old man says, “When we were in school, we used to climb trees. We didn’t have playgrounds, we climbed trees. Look at my arm. I fell out of a tree and broke my arm, when I was a kid.” The kid says, “Well, they did leave us the slides." The slide was about this high. Did you see that? It was just yesterday in the paper.

Grant: You can’t have no fun anymore.

Facincani: I helped out at the Hillcrest School. They put in some new swings and stuff out there. They had sawdust about this deep out there. When we played, we played on broken glass and rocks, you know. We used to have neighborhood football teams. We played up on the Broadway rink. We played tackle football on the Broadway rink during the football season. We didn’t have uniforms or anything, but we played hard tackle football. The coach at the high school once said, “We should play some of those kids. Why don’t we let the freshman team go play up there?” They said, “Oh no, those kids play up there on the broken glass and rocks.”

Grant: It was a tough town, wasn’t it?

Facincani: It was tough. When we played football, you could tell which kid was going to be carrying the ball on the next play, because he was wearing the helmet. Do you know Muz who runs the Freeway? Well anyway, we grew up together. We were playing football up there one day and he got tackled and he got hurt. So we drug him off and set him on the corner. He was there for a while and then his sister or somebody came to get him and he had a broken leg.

Grant: Oh god!

Facincani: Muz still talks about it. I was in the bar about a year ago with my son and my wife. Muz comes over and says, your dad drug me to the sidelines when I had a broken leg. He left me against a fence. Well, that’s the way it goes. You have to be tough. Is this the kind of stuff you want me to talk about?

Grant: I especially like the “I’d rather be shot at than shit at.”

Facincani: I was on guard duty. The hospital had big grounds around it with trees and grass and a fence. We had to patrol the fence on guard duty. We had a rifle, of course, but I didn’t have to kill anybody and nobody killed me. But I was on guard duty one night. The officer of the guard came by. We used to patrol up and down. Sometimes you’d meet with the other guard halfway and you’d talk. Anyway, the officer of the guard came by and says, “How come that fella down there doesn’t have a rifle?” I said, “Well, he’s a conscientious objector. He doesn’t believe in such things.” He says, “Well, but they put him on guard duty?” I was on guard duty permanently, but they put some people on there temporarily. So somebody out of the hospital, every once in a while, had to go on guard duty. They worked in the lab mostly. There were a bunch of conscientious objectors, but they were medics and stuff. The guard said, “But he doesn’t have a gun? It’s one thing to believe in God, but I’d just as soon have a rifle.”

Grant: Well, how is he going to guard against anything?

Facincani: I don’t know. He could holler for somebody, I guess. We were far away from the front that there wasn’t much danger, really, but there was some guerrilla activity around there.

Grant: Do you ever spend much time at the high school nowadays, or at the library?

Facincani: No not really. They don’t want me around. When I was a librarian, we had books. I retired when my son was born in 1990. 1990 was the last year I taught. I’ve been retired almost longer than I taught. Kids came in and we went to encyclopedias to go and find things. Kids wanted to find out about Woodrow Wilson and we had to go to his biography and read it. Nowadays, you just go punch in Woodrow Wilson in the computer and it does it for you. I’m still computer illiterate, more or less. I had to do more with the kids. I guess they have to teach them now how to use the computer. We had to know how to find it. I guess it’s alright now. You punch it and there it is. Now when you do research you do it on the computer?

Grant: It depends on the subject.

Facincani: In college all the magazines you wanted to look at were on microfilm. I would get seasick. It seemed like I was looking through binoculars. I spent so much time there, it’s a wonder I can even see now.

Grant: What was it that you liked so much about libraries? Was it the solitude?

Facincani: I liked helping people find things. I don’t know. Ever since I learned to read, I just kind of loved books. I got my first library card when I was probably 8 years old. Since that time, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a book that I was reading. Sometimes, two or three. It’s just something about books that fascinated me I guess. I got a whole bunch of books that I’ve read already. I got a whole shelf full of books. People say, “What do you do with all those books? Did you read them?” I say, “Yes.” “Why do you keep them?” I don’t know. They’re mine. My sister-in-law says, “Why do you buy books? You read them and then give them away.” But I want them back. I have a little stamp in the books that says, “Property Of . . .”

I don’t understand people that don’t read. To me it’s a tragic part of their life that they don’t like to read. My one boy in Rhode Island, he loves to read. My other two are kind of hit or miss. There’s magic in books.

Grant: What are you reading right now?

Facincani: I’m reading the biography of Grant. There was a new one that came out a few months ago. My son gave it to me as a Christmas present. It’s quite interesting. You should read it.

Grant: My last name is Grant.

Facincani: Are you related?

Grant: I don’t know. People on my dad’s side of the family drink enough to probably be related.

Facincani: Now you see in this book he is accused of drinking more than he actually did. He did drink, but he wasn’t drunk all the time. When he was fighting the battles, he didn’t drink. But there are people are always saying things about him that were malicious because they didn’t like his politics. Grant had a huge family. They came over to the country in 1609 or something. Way back anyway. They had all kinds of children. There are Grants everywhere that are related to him. So you might be. You might be president someday.

That’s one thing I like about biographies. Grant worked in his father’s uncle’s grocery store and hardware store. He was the clerk in the store. Now, he’s sitting in there being a clerk. Now, I know he’s going to be president, but he doesn’t. That’s kind of fascinating.

Grant: Nowadays, I feel like if you don’t have a Harvard law degree and a billionaire father, then you can’t be president.

Facincani: He did well. People took advantage of him. His friends.

Grant: Is there anything else you’d like to add here?

Facincani: It’s easier if you ask me something. My life is a big mishmash of things.

Jaap: So, growing up in the Cabbage Patch. Was that interesting?

Facincani: The one end of it, there was an old section of prostitutes down there. At the end of the street, there’s Platinum Street. There used to be a whole section of prostitutes. You’d see them on Mercury Street. There were a couple of really nice houses, but most of them were just shacks, more or less. There were some businesses on Arizona Street. They fenced it off. They bought all the houses from the people in there. Then they started tearing them down. We still had a coal and a wood stove. My brother and I, every day after school, we had a big wheelbarrow. The tore down houses, we picked up the wood. Our backyard, you wouldn’t believe the pile of wood we had stored there for burning. We got some lumber that we used for building things. Windows and things. There were a lot of people down there doing the same thing. There was no fence around it then. But they were all empty buildings and it was the best playground a kid could ever have. All these empty houses. We’d go down there and played war games and hide and seek. We climbed in the attics. Going in cellars. All these empty houses. Throwing rocks into windows, if there were still any there. It was just a great playground. Then they put a fence around it and came in with bulldozers and pushed everything into the middle and burned it.

Jaap: We have photos of that. Of them bulldozing the Cabbage Patch.

Facincani: Yeah, they bulldozed everything into the middle and set it on fire and then burned it all. My brother and I had our yard full of wood, but we could have kept on going, but we couldn’t get in there anymore after they put the fence around it. It used to be quite a good place to live. I had friends. Several families. There was a mother and children and the father had died. It happened with a couple of families that I was friends with. We used to go down and they had a hell of a playground. They put a skating rink in there. We used to go down there and play and visit and whatnot. Now, it’s kind of a, whatever it is now.

Grant: Section 8.

Facincani: They used to have a policeman on duty there all the time. Who was the coach that used to be the coach at Tech? Bob Green. He’s an outspoken kind of guy. He jokes. One of his jokes. When he was a kid, on Father’s Day, [unintelligible Silver Bow Homes?] kid doesn’t know where to go. On Continental Drive those places. Not quite as fancy as those. But actually the apartments were quite nice there. My friend, they had a wife and the three boys. They each had a bedroom of their own. They had like five or six room apartments. First class plumbing and everything. I don’t know if they’ve maintained it. Of course, that was 19 . . .I think it was 1942 that they had the grand opening. But it was 1938 that they started tearing them down. I was 10 years old then. But I was out gathering wood.

Well, I hope that I’ve done what I’m supposed to do down here. It seems like I’ve spent a lot of my time rambling. Now what are you going to do with this.

Grant: We just have it for future generations.

Facincani: Well, good. I’ll send my grandchildren up here. I’m sorry if I couldn’t tell anymore. I told my wife that if I can’t remember something, I’ll make up a story.

Grant: That’s fine.

Facincani: I’m 89 years old. I’m happy that I can remember who I am. There are some people who can’t. I’m very happy that I’m still here.

Grant: Did you ever think you’d live this long?

Facincani: No. I forget how old I was. Around the turn of the century, I would have been about 70 years old. I remember when I was like 12 wondering, would I be around in 2000? Here it is 2018 and I’m still puttering around.

Grant: I appreciate you sharing your stories.

Jaap: Cathy calls you “fudge.” Where did this nickname come from?

Facincani: I have a story that I tell people that isn’t true. When I was in high school, I was quite the gay blade and all the girls used to try to make me. But my last name is Facincani, so they called me “Fudge-incani,, and then it just became “Fudge.” Some people don’t even know who I am except as Fudge. Linda’s uncle, he was a bartender, I knew him before I knew Linda, of course, we taught together for years. Her uncle said to her, why don’t you say hi to Fudge when you’re up there. She said, “Who?” He said, “That’s old Bob Facincani.” She said, “Oh, I didn’t know who that was.” So the next day at school she called me Fudge, and she hasn’t called me anything else since.

Grant: Do you have much communication nowadays with the teachers’ union? Or are you aware of what’s going on with them?

Facincani: Not much. A friend of mine, he was a teacher and was involved in the union, but he’s retired. I used to keep up with him a little bit, but not really. It’s not as good as it was when I was in it.

Grant: I think nowadays, Mike Kujawa, if he’s not the president, then he’s an officer.

Facincani: Yeah, he is.

Grant: I can’t imagine the scale of change you’ve seen in Butte over your lifetime. It’s hard to convey.

Facincani: We used to have just pen and ink to do things. Now everybody has a computer. Sometimes the pen and ink is a little better. Some people have to have technology for technology sake. It’s there and you should use it. I have a friend, everything new that comes out, he’s gotta have it. He’s got a new iPhone watch. You don’t need all of that. But I guess if it’s there you should use it.

Grant: Do you feel like on a generational level people are more entitled nowadays? Like you say, social security and all these things, they didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Facincani: That’s right. You had to work for it. Like what happened to my grandma. It was something you had to do. Nowadays, you take Grandma and stick her in a rest home. Grandma is lucky if somebody comes by to visit her. Linda’s aunt is in the rest home right now. She was years ago. It’s so sad going in there. She doesn’t know who we are or anything. Years ago somebody would have had to take care of her. So I guess socialism isn’t so bad after all.

Grant: This country since the time you were born until now, it’s like night and day.

Facincani: During the Depression it was different. And then the Second World War, my brother was over there. He had to go over. He was in the army during the war. The scrap drives and all sorts of stuff to help the war effort.

Grant: What was your understanding of the war? You were early in high school.

Facincani: When the war started, I was in the 8th grade. When it ended, I was in my senior year of high school. So my whole high school was during the Second World War. My brother was in the service and so on. Friends of ours got killed. It made a difference, because the town was booming then. They needed the copper and stuff. When the mines were really going, Butte was a going town.

Grant: Was that all anybody talked about was the war?

Facincani: Most everybody had somebody involved. A husband or somebody was off fighting somewhere. Everything was rationed, of course. Gas, you could only buy so much gas. Clothes. Shoes, you even had to have ration stamps to buy shoes.

Grant: Was your brother over in Europe?

Facincani: He was over in North Africa and Italy. He could speak Italian some. He learned it. He was older than me and paid more attention, I guess. In North Africa they had a lot of Italian prisoners and for a while he was working on interrogating. The Italians were on the other side in those days. He spent some time interrogating prisoners. He wasn’t in any combat or anything and neither was I. I have only one good eye. I had myopia when I was a child. Nowadays, they put something over your good eye and make you use your bad eye. Then didn’t know that back then. So I grew up with only one good eye. In 1946 after the war was over. The Second World War had an outstanding GI Bill.

The country is in as good of shape as it is now because so many people got to go to school and become doctors and lawyers and whatever on the GI Bill. They had the same GI Bill and if you joined the army before December something or other of 1946, you could be eligible. Several of us thought that would be a hell of an idea. So we went to join, but I was only 17 at the time and you needed your parents’ permission to join at 17. So I talked it over with my parents and they said sure. They didn’t think it was the greatest idea in the world but they could see the merits in it. So I went to have the physical. They took a look at this eye and they said you can’t pass the physical, you can’t get in the army. So 1951 came along with the Korean War and I got my draft notice. I went to have my physical. They asked if I had ever had a physical before and I said, yeah, I’ve only got one good eye. He said, that’s all you need. In the middle of a war. I was good enough with one eye and so off I went.

Grant: Did your brother ever talk about how they interrogated people?

Facincani: No. Speaking of war experiences. We used to love going to the movies and seeing the Japs get killed. Nowadays, the Japanese are just wonderful folks and they are. But during the war, there wasn’t a single Jap that was worth anything, according to the propaganda that we got. They showed movies of these Japanese guys and they were all vicious looking people. It’s not right, but that’s the way it was. They portrayed us as something else, I suppose. They said the Japanese couldn’t get Pearl Harbor during the war, so they bought it later.

Grant: I think about that too. A lot of people we talk to are very proud of Butte because the copper helped the war effort. In my generation, we’ve never had to face fascism on a global military scale.

Facincani: War is all together from then nowadays. Like the Vietnam war. The Second World War, you were here and the enemy was there and you came together and fought. In Vietnam, there it was all in the jungles and here and there. There wasn’t any actual front or anything. I can’t imagine how horrible it was for those guys. My nephew was there. He doesn’t talk too much about it. He was not happy that he was there.

Grant: My dad did two tours in Vietnam and never talked about it.

Facincani: Most people that had been in the war don’t like to talk about it unless they’re talking to somebody who was there with them. In Korea when the Chinese came across, they overran the whole US positions. There were guys in their sleeping bags sleeping and the Japanese [sic] bayonetted them and killed them. The Chinese or whoever they were. Well, I had a friend who taught at Butte High with me, he was there in the middle of all of that. But he never talked to anybody about it. He talked to me about it because I was there. But he never talked to anybody else about the horrors that he went through. I think it affected him all of his life. You seen people getting killed around you . . .

Grant: Chosin Reservoir.

Facincani: I was there, but I was far enough away from the fighting that I wasn’t involved.

Grant: Time to roll?

Facincani: I don’t want to take up your time if it’s not profitable.

Grant: Oh, it’s not a matter of profitability. I think it’s important to sit down and listen.

Facincani: My son, youngest son, he never ever asks about being in the war or anything. In fact, the only time was in high school. The teacher gave them an assignment to talk to somebody like this. Who lived when I did. About the same things. They came to the house and were visiting. I said I had a job in Korea like Klinger in MASH doing communications like he did, but I didn’t have to wear women’s clothing.

Grant: Who came and talked to you?

Facincani: High school kids. My son’s friends. A teacher in the high school, when I was still there, they were reading about the Depression. He says, “I tell you what. Go down and talk to Mr. Facincani, because he lived through the Depression.” Everyday there was somebody asking me, “Did I have to live in Hooverville? Did I have to live under a bridge?” I says, “No. I didn’t even know it was the Depression. I was 8 or 9 years old.” I had a place to sleep and a place to eat. My father probably worried about not working, but it didn’t bother me. They read about Hooverville and people living in shacks and under bridges and things. They were sad that I was just an ordinary kid living an ordinary life.

Oh, one thing. We never had much money to spend. Things were rarely inexpensive. The junkyards, they would buy copper from kids, but they wouldn’t buy steel. Whenever there was construction, there’d be chunks of copper wire around. We’d save it and bring it there and get paid for it. I shouldn’t tell you this, but there was another junkyard up the road a ways. We’d go over the fence and throw copper over the fence and bring it to the other junkyard and sell it. We were dishonest, I guess, but we didn’t care. I don’t if we got caught, but you could sell rags and you could sell copper, but they wouldn’t buy iron or steel from kids. I don’t know why. I imagine they didn’t give us as much as it was worth, but we didn’t care.

The Park theater on Saturdays, they had a children’s matinee and a nickel could get you in to see the show. There’d be a cowboy show and then a serial, Buck Rogers or something like, a couple of cartoons, and the three stooges or something for a nickel. I don’t know how they made any money, but the place would be packed with kids. If you sit long enough, you think about things that you did.

Grant: What about music? Did you listen to the radio much?

Facincani: We didn’t even have a radio in the house for a long time. Some of our rich friends had them, but we never did. But we finally got one. That was really something to do, to sit and listen to the radio. We loved Jack Benny, Fred Allen. They had all kinds of mystery stories on. They had this one called Inner Sanctum. It was a really spooky show. I remember one time my sister and I were listening to it and it got really scary, so we ran outside. You see the movies now and you see what’s going on, but when you listen you imagine things that could never happen. So we got scared listening to this Inner Sanctum show. But we listened the next week.

Grant: You ran outside?

Facincani: Yeah. I was 10 and she was 8 or something like that. I still remember doing that. Unless, it’s something that I’m making up now.

Jaap: You’re allowed to make up stories.

Grant: There’s always that risk. I really appreciate your time being here today.

Facincani: It’s been kind of fun talking about it. I just hope it was satisfactory.

Grant: There’s no stated goal.

Facincani: If I sit here all afternoon, things come back to me like those radio shows. Sometimes the 50’s, we used to have a radio station called KGIR. In the 50’s, they were in business for 25 years and they had a thing where they went back and put on shows that they had recordings of. Henry was a family show, situation comedies. It was kind of funny. You’d sit and listen to his exploits. So they put this on in the 50’s. They put the Henry Aldrich show on. We listened on the radio and my son said, “That’s all you do is sit here and listen?” I said, “Yeah, you imagine with your mind what was going on.” He said, “That’s not better than watching TV.” I said, “It’s even better than watching TV.”

Grant: It’s similar to reading. In that you have to imagine.

Facincani: Well, yeah. You have to imagine what it all looks like. The actor was probably some little fat guy with a mustache, but he played an 18-year-old kid.

Grant: KGIR

Facincani: You ever listen to Gunsmoke? You ever watch it?

Grant: I have once or twice.

Facincani: Gunsmoke used to be on the radio. I forget the actor who used to play Matt Dillon on the radio, but he became a TV actor later on. And he was this little, short, fat guy, but he had a real voice that was just fit for radio. He was a hell of a Matt Dillon, but he didn’t look anything like James R. Ness. He had a show of his own once. My wife gets mad at me. Sometimes, we are trying to remember somebody’s name or remember something that happens and I’ll think of it in the middle of the night and she’ll say, “Tell me in the morning!” This is what I think. Your mind is like a computer, sort of. You want to know the guy’s name and so your mind is flipping through all these places in your computer and all of the sudden, “Oh there it is.” It happens to you. You’re thinking about something else and then all of the sudden the name will come to you. That’s happened to you.

Grant: But if you have to wait until the morning, you might not remember it.

Jaap: A notepad on the bedside table.

Grant: Yeah, pen and ink.

Facincani: Who was it? Edgar Allan Poe used to have nightmares and then he’d write down whatever it was he dreamed about. He got all kinds of weird stories.

Grant: Yeah. Pit and the Pendulum.

Facincani: I better get home with my wife’s phone before she wonders what happened to it. No, I’ll stay longer if you want, but I don’t know what else to tell you.

Grant: Well, maybe we’ll have to have you back.

Facincani: Well, maybe I’ll go home and write something up. That’s what my wife said. You should write something about your boyhood. I don’t have the flare for writing.

Grant: If you think of things, you can come back.

Facincani: If I remember something really, really exciting. Well, some of the really exciting things, I don’t want to tell you about.

Grant: Next time we’ll have a glass of wine for you.

[END OF RECORDING]