Description:
Jim Jensen talks about growing up on a farm in rural Oklahoma, and his life and career.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Jim Jensen
Interviewer: Melba
Interview Date: 11/9/2007
Interview Location: Ron J. Norick Downtown Library
Melba: Good afternoon. How are you doing, Mr. Jenson?
Jim Jenson: I’m doing fine, Melba. How are you?
M: I’m doing fine. We first want to thank you for participating in our Oklahoma Voices Centennial Project by granting us this interview to help preserve your family history. We’re going to get started. Please tell me your name.
JJ: James J. Jenson.
M: And your birthdate?
JJ: November 13, 1934.
M: And where are we located?
JJ: Where are we located?
M: Mm-hmm [meaning yes].
JJ: We’re at the Metropolitan library in Downtown Oklahoma City.
M: Where were you born?
JJ: I was born in Wichita, Kansas at Saint Mary’s Hospital.
M: Where did you grow up?
JJ: Mainly in Oklahoma between Oklahoma City and Hinton, Oklahoma.
M: What was that like?
JJ: I was right at the end of the Depression. I thought it was great. We were all poor but we didn’t know it. Looking back, we were very poor but didn’t know we were. I thought it was a great childhood, a lot different than today’s environment.
M: What do you remember about the Depression?
JJ: My father died when I was 3, so I then went to live with my grandparents in Hinton, Oklahoma on a farm. My mother had to work, and she couldn’t take care of me, so I stayed with my grandparents for many years. She would come to see me, but I guess the main thing was that we didn’t have anything. We lived in a house that my grandfather built, and no electricity and no indoor plumbing, no indoor heat. My grandmother made my shirts and my clothes out of feed sacks. We’d go to the feed store and what I would pick out so it’d have the pattern to make my shirts or whatever. We made all of our food or grew it, and I helped with that and helped with whatever we did on the farm. I lived with them until they moved into the town of Hinton, and then I lived with my aunt and uncle who lived on the same farm. The Depression, I guess, being that age and at the end of it, my parents and grandparents probably really felt it. I didn’t really feel it. I didn’t know. Looking back, I see how they sacrificed for me and for us to live.
M: What type of farming did your family do?
JJ: My grandfather farmed until he was about 85 when he moved into town. He was still using mules and horsepower. He had no mechanical equipment at all. He grew cotton and pigs and cattle. We had a garden and an orchard. When my aunt and my uncle got married, they moved into town and my uncle took over the farm, and he started bringing equipment. We mainly grew cattle and wheat and cotton. Every once in a while, they’d try to venture out into some other thing. I remember one time we tried to raise sugarcane and watermelon. We did grow peanuts also. That was in World War II.
M: You mentioned that your father died when you were three. Could you tell us the name of your father and your mother?
JJ: My mother’s name was Eleanor, and her maiden name was Montaigne. Jensen was her married name. My father was Harry Jensen.
M: Do you want to give us the name of your grandparents?
JJ: Yes. I never knew my grandparents on my father’s side. They were deceased. My mother’s side was Adolph Montaigne, my grandfather, and Josephine Anne Montaigne was my grandmother.
M: Your father’s parents were deceased. Did you know their names?
JJ: No, I really don’t. I never met them and never knew them.
M: Did you have brothers and sisters?
JJ: I had one sister.
M: And her name?
JJ: Her name was Joanne Jensen. She was named after my grandmother.
M: What was she like?
JJ: She was a free spirit. [laughs] She was kind of like her own person. She couldn’t survive on the farm. I enjoyed working on the farm. I like getting up in the morning and milking cows. That would have killed her. My mother knew that, so she never stayed on the farm. She’d go visit but she was, as I called her, the princess. She always called me the only child, said, “I don’t belong in this family.” [both laugh]
M: That’s funny. So, you called her the princess, and she called you the only child.
JJ: Right. I was the favorite because my grandparents raised me, so of course I ended up being the favorite of all the grandkids. I couldn’t help that. I enjoyed it. [both laugh]
M: You made a mess out of it, huh? Where did you go to school?
JJ: When I started school, I went back to Oklahoma City and when to Corpus Christi Grade School at 16th and Stonewall, I believe it was. Kelley. Somewhere along in there.
M: 17th.
JJ: 17th? Okay. Right in there. We had the whole block, I think. I take it back. My mother decided I needed to go to kindergarten, so she brought me home and I went to Culbertson Kindergarten. When they would decide to have naptime, I got up and left. I don’t need to take a nap! I was used to being on the farm and we were up doing whatever all day long. I’d get up and walk out, and my mother worked, so the teacher would put notes on my shirt. I could read. I guess they didn’t know that. I’d read the note and if it was bad, I threw it away. [M laughs] My mother finally found out what was going on, so she sent me back to the farm and I never did finish kindergarten.
M: You messed up in kindergarten.
JJ: I don’t think I messed up. All it was, was naptime. I thought it was just –
M: [laughing] You weren’t going for that, going for naptime. That is hilarious.
JJ: After I got to Corpus Christi, the nuns straightened me out. Oh man.
M: She sent you back to your grandparents, and they gave you another try in the first grade and sent you back up here.
JJ: Right.
M: Okay, so then you were at Corpus Christi –
JJ: The nuns didn’t mess with me.
M: [laughing] How did the nuns take you on? What did they do?
JJ: I believed in authority. I just didn’t believe in naps, I guess. [M laughs] I really don’t know why I decided to do that, but I’d get up and walk out of kindergarten.
M: Where did you go?
JJ: Home.
M: You’d go back home?
JJ: Yeah. We lived at 18th and Lottie at that time. That was only five blocks.
M: Do you remember your address at 18th and Lottie?
JJ: 1232 Northeast 18th. When my mother – well, my mother worked at Treasures National Bank in Oklahoma City. I really don’t know how she met my father, at a banking convention or something, but he went to work at a bank in Wichita, Kansas. That’s why I was born in Wichita. They got married and she moved to Wichita, and I was born there. Then he decided to come back to Oklahoma City and came back to Treasures National Bank. Treasures National Bank became City National Bank and Treasures moved from Grand and Robinson. City National Bank was at Main and Broadway. At that time, my parents lived on Northeast 4th and Walnut so they could walk to work. My father walked. My mother didn’t work after that. She stayed home until my father died. Before he died, they moved to 8th and Walnut. After he died, she was looking for someplace that was on a streetcar or bus line, and she had a rental property [technical difficulties]. She found this place on 18th and Lottie. She bought it and rented out one side and we lived in the other side. [Technical difficulties]. – Of locusts. It was such a big event. That’s when my grandfather and his brothers found out about Oklahoma, which was not Oklahoma then. It was Indian Territory. He and his brothers came to Oklahoma in the late 1800s and settled around Hinton. They had more land than they could keep in the land run, so they had to give some of it up. They gave a lot of it up. They got in and they had good sites on rivers and creeks and all this, and you could only have so many acres, so they – well they couldn’t really take it from them. I guess they were Sooners. They were here before the land run. My grandfather moved to South Dakota, and that’s where he met and married my grandmother. She was of Irish descent and came from Ireland as a little girl to New York and then South Dakota. Why South Dakota, I don’t know. Maybe they thought that was good farmland there. Then they came to Oklahoma because they heard that there was land that they could get for nothing.
M: The land run. They heard about it.
JJ: They came before the land run. They had more land than they could – they had to give up land. The original homestead, my grandfather’s original homestead, my mother and her sister, my aunt that helped raised me, they owned the property. They’re both deceased now so I own it with one of my cousin’s wives. We own the same property right now. We own that farm.
M: The family farm.
JJ: Yup.
M: Let’s name your aunt and uncle so that their memories will be preserved.
JJ: My aunt was Irene Montaigne. She married Elmer Ramming. When I was living with grandparents, she was still unmarried and we lived in the farmhouse, and it had an upstairs. My aunt was kind of my surrogate mother, the way she was taking care of me. She was not married. I went on her dates with her and her husband. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d come get her in his car and they took me with them. I don’t know why. I remember my uncle telling me, “You could ask more questions than any three kids could.” [M laughs] I wanted to know about everything. Then I’d say, “Why?”
M: You double-dated with them.
JJ: I was their chaperone, I guess, and didn’t know it. [both laugh]
M: That’s hilarious. That is hilarious.
JJ: He was German, and his parents lived in Hinton. In fact, they spoke German. During World War II, since he was a farmer, he was not subject to the draft. We would go to Fort Reno. We couldn’t get help, except me. I was seven when the war started and about twelve when it ended. I was driving tractors –
M: From seven to twelve?
JJ: Yeah. By the time I was twelve, I was driving the wheat trucks into town. You had to. You couldn’t get any help because all the young men were at war or they were 4F and couldn’t work, or draft dodgers and my uncle didn’t want them. We had prisoners of war that were Germans that were sent to El Reno. Since my uncle could speak German, he would go over and they would let these guys go work on the farm. They weren’t going to run off. Where were they going to go? They’re in the middle of the United States and the ocean is a long way away. A lot of them were just kids, 18 or 19 years old, that were glad to be out of the war. They told my uncle that they had been told that if they were captured, they would be dead. The Americans would kill them. After they found out that they weren’t going to be killed, they wanted to go home, of course, to their family. They were glad to be out of the war, at least that’s what they told us. Most of them were just farmers’ kids off the farms in Germany, and they were glad to work on the farms. My aunt and uncle would feed them lunch. We had chickens. We would kill maybe 25-30 chickens a day to feed all these guys. Everything was done by hand. Chopping cotton. They would send one guard with them from Fort Reno and he would go to sleep under a tree. I don’t even know if his gun was loaded. Nobody’s running off. I didn’t know much German, but some of them could speak a little English, and they were – whenever he’d show up, they all wanted to come work for my uncle. Like I said, my aunt would fix them fried chicken and fried okra and sliced tomatoes. Whatever we had in summertime and they loved it.
M: That’s very touching. Did you have a military career?
JJ: Yes I did.
M: Let’s talk about your military career.
JJ: Okay. I was going to college and the Korean War was going on. When I graduated from high school, I graduated in ’52 so the Korean War was still going on. If you were on college, you weren’t drafted. I was going to college, but I would run out of money and drop out. Then I’d go back to school and drop out. About the third time I dropped out, the draft got me.
I was drafted and went to basic training at Fort Linwood, Missouri, and then was sent to Fort Dix, Missouri for advanced training, and then was sent to Fort Halberg, Maryland to work in counterintelligence. When I was there, I was supposed to go to Korea from there. They sent me back to Fort Dix. They called it a replacement depot. There were 800 guys getting ready to be shipped out, and all of us, we thought, were going to Korea. A replacement depot is just a bunch of guys. You’d stay in the barracks and every morning you’d come out and line up and they’d give you detail to do or wait until your orders came out on the board. Every day you’d check your orders. If your orders weren’t there, you could usually have the rest of the day off. You could go into town or go back to sleep, whatever you wanted to do, unless you had KP or whatever else they made you do. One day, I got a call over the loudspeaker saying, “Would Jenson please report to so-and-so office for a telephone call?” I went to the office to get this phone call, and the voice says, “Are you the Jim Jenson from Oklahoma?” I said yeah. He says, “Do you remember me?” I said, “Your voice sounds familiar.” Then it dawned on me who it was. This friend of mine was working personnel and saw my name come through to go to Korea, and he said, “How would you like to go to Germany instead?” They had eight slots go to Germany, so he pulled my name out of the 800 and stuck me in to go to Germany. I immediately said, “I’m taking you out for steak dinner.” So I got to go to Germany instead of Korea.
M: That’s unbelievable.
JJ: I know. Otherwise, who knows what would happen? So I go to Germany and I was there three years and came back. Actually, I was there a little over two years. I came back, went back to school, met Lou, got married, was in my final semester of college and President Kennedy sent me a notice that said, “We request your presence for the Cuban crisis.” So I had to drop out of school and go to Fort Linwood, Missouri and stayed there for almost a year. We never did go to Cuba, of course, but Russia backed down and they sent to missiles back and we never did go.
M: A break in school again.
JJ: I came back and went to school and finished college. That was my military career. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the Europe part of it. Fort Linwood, Missouri, I didn’t enjoy. That was – [both laugh] – in the swamps with alligators and tarantulas and snakes. The European tour I liked.
M: What was it the European tour that you liked?
JJ: I love to travel, and I got to do a lot of traveling while I was there. Every weekend I went somewhere different if I could get off. I took military hops to different countries.
M: Let’s name those countries while you’re in your interview. Do they stand out in your mind?
JJ: I went to Spain several times, England many times, Italy, Switzerland, East Berlin before the wall, Turkey, Ireland, Scotland. My mother loved traveling. I guess got the bug from her. All you had to tell my mother was, “Let’s” and she’d go.
M: You mentioned that you started and stopped school several times, so you had a resolve to complete your higher education. Would you like to tell us where you completed and attended college?
JJ: I started at the University of Oklahoma. I was not a stellar student, shall we say. I liked to not study, so I would get on the bad list and have to be on probation, and then I would get off the bad list and I’d, you know –
M: Straighten up.
JJ: Well, kinda. Anyway, the last time I dropped out, I should have graduated. If I started in ’52, I should have graduated in ’57. I thought I was going to graduate, and that last year, I got discouraged. I was partying too much or whatever. I don’t know what I did, but I decided to drop out and work for awhile and get my income back. That’s when I got drafted. When I dropped out, I didn’t do it the proper way. I should have gone and dropped my courses and told them, but I just didn’t show up anymore. All those courses I was taking, they gave me Fs in. So then I went back and after being in the military, I could see I probably needed a college education if I wanted to do something differently.
I go back to the University of Oklahoma and I go to enroll, and they said, “You’re really going to be on probation. Before you can even get off probation, you’re going to have to get all these Fs – you’re going to have to make As in all these courses to even get them up to a C average.” Some of these courses, I didn’t have any more interest in than the man in the moon now. I had like physics and biology and I don’t know what I was thinking I was be, a doctor or something. Anyway, I took these courses that I didn’t have any interest in, so I would have had to have taken those, and it would take me maybe – and I had to make straight As in them too. I thought there was no way I was going to make straight As in these courses, and besides that, I don’t like them. [M laughs] That’s why I dropped out, because I took these dumb courses. Anyway, so I got to looking around and Central State University, I could transfer my courses there. (Note: Central State University is now the University of Central Oklahoma.) They would not hold those Fs against me. Wait, they were Incompletes. They were not Fs. They were Incompletes. The University of Oklahoma said I had to make up those Incompletes, and I would have to make As in them so they wouldn’t be – but they weren’t really Fs on my transcript. They were Incompletes. Central State at the time said they’ll take my courses, but we will ignore those Incompletes. We don’t have those courses here. I could graduate in a little over a semester, so I could go there and finish, because I was going to take business courses. I could get a business degree from them and not have to worry about all those courses I flipped off. I would rather have graduated from the University of Oklahoma because I went to school there. I was a Sooner and I was a roughneck on the field, and that was my school, but I wasn’t willing to pay the price that I was going to have to. I don’t think I could have done it, either, make all those grades, so I went to Central State.
M: That was a difficult decision.
JJ: Well, it wasn’t difficult in that I had two options and this was going to be the way to go.
M: Well, with the way you had to do it, you ended up with training from both schools, even though you didn’t finish.
JJ: I had a good education. That was nothing against Central State. I liked it.
M: I understand.
JJ: I just messed up, like most kids. Instead of graduating when I should, it took me eleven years.
M: I can relate. I had an experience like that in my undergraduate school where I just partied because I’d never –
JJ: I didn’t like school. That was my main problem. I liked going to classes and studying history and I liked math, but I didn’t like studying. I didn’t like dates. I didn’t like to memorize. I just didn’t like being in school. I hated school. I like to learn, but I hated school. That was my problem.
M: You were a learner.
JJ: I would blow it off. I wouldn’t go to class. Then I’d go to a test and of course I didn’t know what they were talking about. [both laugh]
M: You were a learner, but you couldn’t adapt to the institutional learning.
JJ: I could have. I just didn’t.
M: You just didn’t. Was there a teacher that had a particularly strong influence on you that you remember that you’d like to tell me about?
JJ: [pause] Not really. I had one teacher in eighth grade, I guess. I think her name was Sister Mary Francis. I think she made an impression on me, but none of them really stood out. Like I said, I never really liked school. You saw in kindergarten that I’d leave.
M: [laughs] Yeah, you got off to the wrong start for sure.
JJ: If they had just opened my head and put the stuff in there, I could have gone on with it. [M laughs]
M: Do you have a love of your life you’d like to tell us about in your interview?
JJ: My wife Lou. Forty-five years. In fact, our anniversary was yesterday. I don’t know if she told you that or not.
M: No, she didn’t. [reconsidering] Well, she talked – yes, she did. She did tell us about that.
JJ: She’s the love of my life and my best friend.
M: You’re blessed and highly favored. Are there any words – when you finished your military career, take us from there to the point of your retirement. Just walk us through that journey.
JJ: When I got out the military – well, the first time I got out of the military, that’s when I went to Central State. That’s when I met Lou. Well, I met Lou before I even went in the military. I met her about four years before that. I came back from the military and looked her up, and she was still available and kind of – [laughs]. Anyway, we got married. We were married while I was going to school, and then I got called back in for the Cuban crisis. I came back and finished, and when I came back to school – well, before I went back for the Cuban crisis, in going to school, I worked at the Plaza Tower Hotel. It was a brand-new hotel at the time that was built on 10th and Shartel. It’s not even there anymore, right across from Saint Anthony’s Hospital. I was a night clerk there. My minor was in accounting, and I did a lot of income taxes for people. I worked for H&R Block part time. I was the night auditor at the Plaza Tower Hotel, the night clerk and the night auditor.
When I got called into the military again for Cuba, when I came back, then I decided that I was going to finish school and not work. Lou was going to work. I finished school, and then I had all these offers from recruiters. The one I took was with the federal – what do they call it? Wage and Hour Investigation and Child Labor Laws.
They sent me to training in Washington, D.C., and I learned the procedures and was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas. I loved working in the Child Labor Law part of it. We’d go out in the fields and find kids that were not supposed to be working when school was on, working in the sweat shops, and close them down or whatever we had to do. The wage and hour part of it was such a gray area at the time, and lot of times we’d go into a business – you were on your own and you had your own caseload – and I would go in and because of what we would find, to make these people in compliance with the wage and hour, a lot of times people would just shut down the business. They couldn’t afford it, so they let these people off. Now these people who’d had some kind of a job, some kind of an income, were now completely without income. I really felt bad because I’d caused – I mean, I really didn’t cause it, but I was the one doing the investigation. They were in violation. I just couldn’t do that to people, so I decided I couldn’t do this anymore after about a year. I quit and I learned another lesson on that.
I didn’t have a job when I quit. I didn’t realize there was a mini-recession going on. This was during - I think Eisenhower was in office, so ’63. I couldn’t find a job. Here our son is small, my wife – my sister lives in Dallas, so I thought if I can’t find a job in Dallas, I can’t find one anywhere. My sister let us move in with her. She was single. We moved into her apartment, and I spent every day going to either employment agencies or just walking and knocking door to door looking for job. It was funny. One place I went into, I saw the job in the paper. They did road work and they were laying asphalt. It was an asphalt plant, and they needed somebody to work in the plant as kind of a manger of overseeing some kind of equipment. I go up and the guy says, “I’d like to hire you. I think you’d be a good employee if you stayed, but you’re overqualified. The first thing you’d do when you got a better job is leave.” I said, “Well, that’s probably right.” [both laugh] Other than that, I wasn’t even offered a job. After about a month and a half, I still hadn’t found anything Dallas, so I came to Oklahoma City and started looking around. Same thing. People weren’t hiring. It was just kind of a mini-recession going on.
One day, I saw an ad in the paper about Montgomery Ward was looking for a store manager, but they didn’t say where. Somewhere in the Oklahoma district. I called up the person and he said it was closed. That person is out of Tulsa and he’s the hirer and he says the jobs are closed. I said, “Where is he in Tulsa?” So they told he where he was located in Tulsa. I drive up there, found him, and told him who I was and what I was looking for, and he hired me on the spot for the Norman store. We moved to Norman, which was great for me because that’s where I wanted to be anyway. I was a manager at the Montgomery Ward catalog store in Norman on Main Street. I did that for a couple of years, and my boss, who was being assigned – at that time, we were out of the Kansas City district. Kansas City had all these offices and all these stores in Oklahoma and the middle of Arkansas; as far west as Woodward, Oklahoma; Midland – not Midland – Wichita Falls, Texas; and somewhere up in Kansas. We had big area. He had to go to those stores every month. He was being promoted to the Kansas City office, and he wanted me to be promoted to his job. I came home and talked to Lou and I told her if I take this job, I’m going to be gone all the time, every day. In a month, you had to visit all these stores. There were so many stores you had to go to at least one a day. I wasn’t going to be home very often, so I decided not to take it. Corporate world back then, especially if you turned down Montgomery Ward for a promotion, you never were considered for a promotion again. I knew this. I knew that’s what was going to happen.
At that time, I decided to put in – at that time, they had a program called the Federal Employees Entrance Exam. I took that test and I scored really high on that test, so I started getting offers from different places. One came from Tinker was working in computers, and computers at that time – when I was in college, they had one paragraph in some of our business books that said computers was a coming thing. That’s about it. The Air Force was the leader in computers at that time, and they were looking for people that could pass their test, and they would send you to school to train. It was six months’ probation. If you passed the six months and fulfilled all the requirements, then they would hire you permanently. I went to IBM school, RCA school, and Univex school, and they were all in machine language at that time. There was no other language but machine language. You had to learn that. The dropout rate – about 80 percent of the people dropped out because their mind just didn’t work like that. Finally, the lightbulb came on me and it clicked on me. This was my math, I guess, and I really loved it. I wish they’d had that when I was in college. I probably would have been interested in that. I spent 34 years working in computers.
M: That was your niche.
JJ: That’s where I was until I retired. When I retired, then I started doing volunteer work and stuff. Then I became a bailiff for the Cleveland County District Court during jury dockets. I bailiff during jury trials only, which is kind of part time. Low pay, but it’s a lot of fun and I enjoy it.
M: It keeps you busy and you enjoy it. [pause] You want to give us your son’s name?
JJ: Franklin Reginald Jensen.
M: Do you have any grandchildren?
JJ: No. We have one that’s supposed to be here March of next year. Julia Lorraine. We had a son Michael who died. He lived about twelve hours.
M: I’m sorry to hear that.
JJ: My wife had about eight miscarriages so for some reason, we weren’t supposed to have a lot of kids. [chuckles]
M: You know, that is – how did that affect your life to lose all those babies?
JJ: It probably affected Lou more than I, I guess, I’m sure, because [trails off] –
M: She carried them.
JJ: Right. It just made life more precious, the son we have, and the one we almost had that lived for twelve hours. I don’t know what – my son would probably like to have a sibling. He was an only child, really, but we couldn’t help it.
M: Right, and sometimes you don’t understand why these things happen like that.
JJ: No, but I always had the positive – maybe I’m too positive, but I always think things are the way they’re supposed to be and it’s for the best, for whatever reason. It’s like playing poker. God knows what’s in my hand. I don’t. I haven’t got those cards yet.
M: I would like you what do you remember about the Oklahoma City bombing in your interview?
JJ: That morning, I was supposed to be in that building across the street. The IRS was in the federal building, not the Murrah Building, but the one across the street. The IRS was in that building, and I was supposed to be there at nine in the morning. I had some problems, but not with my taxes. Well, I guess it was. They wanted to talk to me about something on my income tax. My accountant said I had to go show the paperwork and all this. I was retired then. I woke up that morning and I just didn’t feel like going in that morning, so I called. They said no problem and I could come in the afternoon. Shortly thereafter that, my wife, who worked at the prison down in Lexington, said, “Do you have the TV or the radio on?” I said no and she said, “Well, something’s happening in Oklahoma City. We’re trying to find a friend of ours.” I thought I’d heard a boom, but it might have been something else. In my mind, I thought I heard it. Fran is a friend of ours from Pennsylvania and worked for the Department of Corrections and has no family here. Her boyfriend didn’t know where she was, and they didn’t know where she was, so she said, “Can you go see if you can find her?” I said, “Sure.”
I drive up to Oklahoma City, and I drive up to the bombing area. At that time, they thought it was a gas explosion, I think. Nobody knew. They hadn’t shut it down yet, and I go up and I’m talking to people and I said I was looking for a friend and blah blah blah. They said, “We’ve sent a lot of people to Mercy and to Saint Anthony and other hospitals. That’d be the best place to go.” Then they started shutting it all down. So I get to Saint Anthony’s, and they still hadn’t shut Saint Anthony’s down, so I’m going around and I’m not family or anybody, but I’m looking for her. They said, “We brought in some lady and she has glass in her eyes. She’s being operated on on such-and such floor.” I went up there and that’s where she was. I found her. Then they shut the hospital down. They wouldn’t let anybody in because they were afraid somebody might be part of the problem, coming in. So I sat with Fran. I couldn’t call anybody. I couldn’t tell anybody. Nobody knew where I was, but I knew where she was. [laughs] I was in there and Fran knew me. She was awake, so I stayed with Fran all that day until that evening when I could get ahold of Lou and get ahold of her boyfriend, er, fiancé. Of course, growing up in Oklahoma City and being in that area, what we saw on television was not the devastation that – the news showed the Murrah Building. Our friend, who was in the Journal Record building, was the one who was looking for her. Several people died in that building. As far away as Saint Anthony’s, windows were blown out. At the time I went up there, I just thought and heard on the news that it was a big gas explosion downtown. I just went right in like I should be there. Of course, they finally got us all out of there. We knew four people who died in the Murrah bombing.
M: Do you want to name the four people that you knew?
JJ: You know, I can’t even think of their names now. Most of them were from the Department of Corrections, and Lou knew them really well. I knew them as going to conventions and things with her. I can’t think of their names now.
M: I can understand that.
JJ: Fran Ferrari was the one. Another one that was injured real badly in the Murrah building was – she’s an Indian attorney – Rebecca Crier. She was also injured, and she survived. I can’t think. I’m sorry. I just can’t think of them.
M: That’s understandable. As an insurance agent, I received calls as far away as 45 miles and reports all over town. I understand.
JJ: Well, I think the sound probably, maybe, made it to Norman. I really think I heard it. The sound probably went more north because of the buffer of the building. It probably threw the sound mostly north.
M: Let me tell you, it was something to recall, something to experience.
JJ: It was. It was not good.
M: We appreciate your sharing your memories of it in this interview. What are the dreams you have for your son and grandchildren?
JJ: Mainly that the – it seems so cliché, but just to have a good life. I used to have probably high expectations that I didn’t have for myself, and so I finally learned that their life is their decision, and I hope they have a happy life and I hope what they do – in my family, it’s that if you enjoy what you do, whatever the pay is, that’s great if you like what you’re doing. I had some jobs that I hated and I didn’t stay with it. I could have, but I hated it. I took lower-paying jobs because I didn’t like what I was doing, like the one in Corpus Christi. I hated what I was doing to some of the people, even though it was done legally and it was right. I hated doing it, so I couldn’t. My conscience, I couldn’t sleep with it. Maybe that’s why I got into computers. Computers, I don’t deal with people.
M: I can understand. I can relate to that.
JJ: I enjoyed computers. I guess the puzzle-solving. I liked to solve puzzles, and computers at that time were a problem to solve.
M: Problem-solving was important to you, not involving people.
JJ: Well, it involved people because I had to go talk to them to find out what they wanted out of the system. We designed programs and wrote programs and it was all military stuff. We had to find out from the people that were going to use it what they really wanted out of it, so we dealt with people. I guess it did affect some people’s lives, but when you got the parameters and worked on it, then you were kind of in your own isolated world of doing it and testing it. You figured out that this won’t work, but maybe this will work, or this will work. Let’s try this. There’s many ways of doing something with a computer. No one wrong or right way.
M: As we begin to end your interview, I’d like to make sure we ask you what is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your life that you can think of.
JJ: Hmm. Well, at this stage in my life, I’ve lived a lot longer than I thought I would. [both laugh] I enjoy every day and I guess if there’s anything else – in fact, I’ve got it on my cell phone. It’s James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” As long as I feel good, I’m glad to get up every morning and see what’s next.
M: The final question we’d like to ask you in your interview is if you’d be willing to share your religious beliefs with us.
JJ: Yes. My religion is Catholic.
M: Okay. Mr. Jenson, thank you for honoring us with your interview. Oklahoma Voices is better off because of your participation. Thank you.
End of interview.