A Day in the Life: Dr. Bill James, Author and Centenarian (Part 3)

Dr. Bill James, a 101-year-old Northford resident, recently completed writing a book–The Monetarists–and . But not before he .

Today, we conclude our series with Dr. Bill James with some snippets of interesting stories from his past in his own words. 

Early Airplanes

I used to see airplanes flying around and they were the kind with two wings. Once day we saw one go down in a hay field not too far from where we were and so we were driven over there. It was apparently very simple what happened to the plane because the pilot was standing there very nonchalantly. He got the farmer pretty mad, though, because the people trampled all over his hay.

But I can remember the pilot picking me up and showing me the whole inside of the cockpit and telling me how everything worked. I imagine I was about six at the time and I thought that was just wonderful.

Buffalo Bill

I saw Buffalo Bill in Alberta. It used to be that more people read about Buffalo Bill, but when I saw him, he was on a white horse in all white with a white hat. He was a very good-sized man, but he rode around the rodeo tipping his hat to everyone. He didn’t do anything spectacular, but he was gracious. Everybody clapped.

I saw him up in Edmonton. When I was there it was a rather primitive city, I was only about three. From what I hear, it has developed into a huge city.

Huge Salary

I graduated with a degree in history and economics and got a job teaching math and science. I graduated in 1933 and only 8 percent of the student body had a job. I felt very, very fortunate.

I had a huge salary–$1,344 for the whole year *laughs*, but the prices were low. I remember going out and buying a used car with 17,000 miles on it for $240. 

Civil War Era

Merrill, my mother’s mother’s father, was in charge of a crew that loaded ships. During the Civil War, his crew got to be very much in demand because they were fast. When ships came into New York, the crew that could help the owners get the products to market first could get the highest prices, so his crew was popular.

One day he was a approached by a person who wanted to know about him loading a ship and my grandfather wanted to know where the ship was going, and, apparently, he figured out that the destination was a little made up.

The people who employed him and his crew said they wanted to take the whole crew with them because it was very important to off-load in a hurry in the new destination, but my grandfather didn’t go and he lived.

What was being loaded apparently was a bunch of guns and war material, it was being taken from New York to go to southern states to be used against the North. So when the crew got down to the southern states, the word got back and as soon as they got everything off the ship, they were all taken out and shot.

Prohibition Risk

During the prohibition days, some of the cement truck drivers were also liquor truck drivers. 

One of them men said he'd look in his glove compartment box and find a note that said 'Go to Al's' and he would drive to Al's for breakfast. When he'd get back to his truck he'd find another note in his glove compartment box that would tell him to go to Tommy's. He'd go there for a long lunch and sometimes he would get back to his truck and find up to $500 in there. 

What was happening was men would filled up his truck with liquor under the cement bags while he was at Al's and then other men would transfer the liquor out of his truck and pay him while he was at Tommy's. 

He said he never touched the liquor and never saw the men moving it. I didn't want to get too chummy with them in case they got caught.

The Chełmiński Family in Switzerland

After my mother got her degree, she got a job teaching at a college, but she was fired for being a divorced woman. She decided that she would go over to Europe and study at the University of Paris and the University of London so I went along and went to Lausanne, Switzerland, to study. 

I left prep school and lived with a family there called Count and Countess Chełmiński. They had had huge sugar beet farms in Poland during WWI, but the Germans came through and took all their horses–7,000 horses. They went out and bought 4,000 more horses and the Germans took them.

So they decided to get out Poland and the left with Jan Paderewski, who was very much a Polish patriot and world renowned pianist, and some other people and went to Switzerland and opened up a boarding place where I ended up getting a room. 

Lost in Translation

I went up into Germany in 1929. Before going there I tried to learn some German at school from a professor who only spoke French. I got onto a train to go from Frankfurt to Heppenheim. A man came through the train, big fellow, and I said, “Wo ist Heppenheim?” I had been told it would be the eighth stop, we had been eight stops and still no Heppenheim. The stations those days only had one light over the sign over the name of what the town was. 

The man talked and talked and talked and I couldn't understand him. 

When I finally got there, I was met by three boys. I think I could have come from any place in the world with any language and those three boys could have talked with me. There were all multi-lingual. A fellow from South Africa named Nigel was right there though and he spoke wonderful English, but he never said a word!

At that school I ran into a lot of different people from different parts of the world. I remember we were in a chat room, a bunch of students talking together, nothing formal, and one German boy said to the other, “I like Hitler! You like Hitler?” Just like that.

I realized immediately that Hitler had gotten to the young people of Germany. So that made me think, ‘I’ve got to know more about what’s going on in Germany.'

Professor Pierre Gilliard

I went to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and while I was there, one of my professors was named Pierre Gilliard. For 13 years, he was the private tutor to the Royal Family in Russia, Nickolas and Alexander. 

I wondered how it is that Pierre lived. Here he is the private tutor for the Royal Family in Russia, he lived, and yet a lot of people who worked in the royal court had been shot along with the family.

What I figured out was that Pierre was a Swiss citizen. During World War I, the Germans were fighting on two fronts, the Eastern front up against Russian and the Western front up against France and the allies. They wanted to sort of quiet one of those fronts down so they went to Lenin.

Lenin, at the time, was in Switzerland where he was being given asylum by the Swiss. The Germans made arrangements with him so that if he could get to Russia and he could get to be the head of Russia, then Lenin could sue for peace. This was the German attempt to get peace on their Eastern front.

That’s what happened. They took Lenin across Germany in a sealed car and they got him up against the Scandinavian countries and he went from there into Russia. He became the head of Russia and sued for peace. 

The Russian Royal Family had, I think, six daughters and one son with Leukemia. The son and Pierre were taken away and put onto a railroad car and one day Pierre woke up and he was all alone. The son was taken away back to the family and shot. 

My assumption was, based on my studies, that Pierre was spared because he was Swiss. The Germans did not want to upset the Swiss and that’s how Pierre lived.

A Theory

A very interesting set of circumstance developed–the United States has gotten itself into the United Nations and there was a security council in the United Nations. A number of nations sent people there and, at one point, the person from Russia stopped attending. I wondered why. 

On June 25, 1950, the American troops were in Korea and trying to withdraw. The North Koreans attacked our troops as they were trying to withdraw. Immediately, the security council voted to go to war with North Korea. The reason they were able to do that was because of the fact that the Russian man was not there.

Months beforehand, they had been planning not to have a Russian representative on the security council so that nobody could raise a question about it. It was all a plan. The other part that seemed planned was the the security council made the decision so fast. It was almost immediate and it almost looked like a cooked up job. 

Money people in this country have always wanted wars because they would serve as substitute deficit finance procedures. When Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to spend money back in the 1930s, he found that he was up against a political stone wall. Then he manufactured a war, which became WWII, and immediately the country created an enormous amount of debt.

Getting the Best of the System

I was up in Vermont in the summertime in a very rural area. There was a post office there run by a lady. There were so few people there that I wondered why it was open, but I found out later that that family sold maple syrup. They shipped the maple syrup out of there and they got to take 124 percent of postal cancellations. That meant that 30 cents on a can of maple syrup, they were going to get back somewhere around 45 cents. They were making money on the postage!