The next day I used two hours of my spare time and sawed more pieces than the other two men had been sawing in 20 man-hours. Not only that, my pieces fitted better and there were none to throw away. From then on, I sawed out all the pieces in my spare time, and the two sawmen went back to packing nosecones.

One of the Lockheed supervisors saw a lot of the little efficiencies in my work and he told me that, after the war, if I would team up with him, we could make a million dollars. He said that with my brain and his "gab" we could improve the efficiency of factories all over America.

For an example, they gave me charge of the hot-oil department which had been keeping two men busy. I soon had it so I could handle it alone. Then I made more improvements and could loaf half the time. When I took over the job of sawing the plywood pieces, I was doing the work that four men had been doing, and still had time to loaf and see who else needed help. Lockheed was paying me $12 a day and I was saving them the other $36 a day.

During those four months that fall, there was an awareness in the back of my mind that the day was coming when we would need gas to get back to Texas in December. I had saved all the coupons I could, but it looked as though we might be about 25 gallons short. And since I hadn't worked six months at this job, I knew I wouldn't be able to get coupons this time. So, I asked my straw-boss, "Don't you have a gasoline camp stove up overhead in your garage?"

He said, "Sure have. You can use it any time you want to."

I said, "I don't want to use it, just want to borrow it."

We left it up in his garage. But now that I had one, I went to the ration board and applied for gasoline coupons for it. The lady at the board told me she thought 50 gallons would last six months and she issued me coupons for that amount. And so, in just a few minutes I walked out of there a lot happier than I was when I walked in.

Now we had plenty of coupons to take us to Texas. But we still had a little problem. The coupons each called for two gallons and each one had "stove" printed across the front. Some service station workers might frown on the idea of pumping stove gas into Buick automobiles. So we bought our stove gas in five gallon cans and then poured it into the Buick's tank after we got away from the station. The Buick liked it. It didn't know the difference.

Now, you can be sure I didn't enjoy doing these little things which were maybe just a little bit outside the rigid rules laid down by Washington. Of course I didn't. And I'm sure Moses didn't enjoy seeing the waters of the Red Sea close in and engulf thousands of Pharaoh's soldiers. But we both did what we had to do. I was crossing a Red Sea 1200 miles across—and I made it, just as he made it. I'll admit there's one little difference here, God told Moses to do what he did. I'm not quite sure God was the one who told me to do what I did. Maybe the devil made me do it.

Anyway, we got back to the Royston farm that last time and stayed until we moved to Arkansas five years later. It was the first of the year of 1945 and Uncle Jim had not yet started to have the papers fixed up for me to buy the farm. I asked him to go ahead and get the abstract in shape for me as agreed. But three months later he still had not begun. It looked as though he had decided not to let me have it. I couldn't buy it without his cooperation. So I finally made a deal with him to operate the farm on a percentage basis.