Notes on the Victims

If I've paid scant attention to the victims, it's mainly because I wasn't really sure what approach I could take to discussing them or how I'd go about finding things to say. Not bad, all I was missing was what to talk about and how to tell it. Quite an admission. bat I mean is that I'd like to get out of this part of it by claiming I just didn't know much about them, why would it matter now to talk about who they were, how it would just sound like polite lip service to the dead, and so on. Rather than acknowledge my near-total inability to gather up additional information about them, I will instead employ one of my by-now customary evasions to doing a careful, thorough reporting job and instead offer some tantalizing bits of information and short episodes I've picked up along the way.

The trap in talking about the victims is close to that of talking about their likely murderer. Trying to present neutral "facts" makes it appear I'm taking a position on one side or the other. Bad information about one of the dead men looks like I'm on Michael's side or saying that because they had weaknesses or uncomplimentary traits they were more deserving of the places they are now. Believe me, I'm not trying to do that. If the following material appears tipped too strongly towards recounting odd quirks that put the now deceased in a poor light, then I am ready to say that the "apparent" bias is totally a result of the sources I was able to tap. I'm sure somebody could talk to the families and associates of all the dead men and wind up with portraits of each of them that could make you cry at the sense of tragic loss. Time pretty much did that, with their series of insert boxes in their longest story about the murders, each box telling the personal history of one of the casualties. If that's the kind of information you want, it is readily available, not just in Time but in a good deal of what coverage there's been. I don't feel as a whole that the victims have been slighted in volume of attention. All I'm saying is I'd wholly agree that what follows could well lead to totally distorted views of each of the five. I'm certain that for every quaint idiosyncracy I could recount, there are likely ten more stories about what devoted husbands, loving fathers, and all-around great guys each of them were. try only defense for what I'm about to do is to hide behind a claim that what I've included here is very simply the result of the information I was given by people I was talking to for other reasons. I did not go out and talk to any relatives of the dead men, or contacted anyone just to gather information about them, so all I came up with was a bunch of hearsay and rumors. None of the stories is that horrible, don't worry, but I was concerned about not leaving a false impression that I am making any claims here to have done a thorough or an accurate job.

This chapter is the result of collected notes on the victims, most of it left out of earlier interviews because I was anxious not to cause trouble for the people I have spoken to by attributing to them stories which could reflect very badly on my sources if taken ever so slightly out of context. So whenever one of these little stories came up, I just kept track of it, figuring eventually there'd be enough to put them all safely together, as has indeed happened.

On one hand, I should say that I'm anxious not to report anything which would cause the survivors of the deceased undue pain. The families have suffered considerably, no doubt, by their unexpected losses. I don't seriously expect that any of them would want to read this any more than I wondered earlier why Sharon Willetts would want to read it either, but should they do so, I would reiterate the unverified nature of the material presented here. I should mention, however, that the deaths of the five did make them public figures, and not subject to invasion of privacy or libel in the same manner as if they had led totally private lives and died in more customary circumstances. I would claim, moreover, that even if a good deal of what follows is improperly exaggerated or downright false, it is still important to record it here to give a clear picture of the kinds of untrue rumors which likely fueled the climate which led to their deaths. Just as lots of false information was spread in Dallas about John Kennedy, in inflammatory full-page newspaper ads and in lots of idle hateful gossip, Yuba City may not have been immune from similar activities. So, if ordinarily town gossip and unlocatable rumors should be dismissed entirely, I would justify their public airing simply for the opportunity to ultimately lay to rest their acceptance. Perhaps I might add that if any family member takes offense at information reported here and Is able to put any of these rumors incontestably in the falsehood category, I will be happy to retract or openly attack any of the reports which may have been wrongly spread. There'll be no libel suits arising out of this section, because I will retreat immediately into apology and correction, and I will also repeat again that my purpose in covering these areas here is to try to explore why the deaths occurred, a desire I would hope everyone, especially the families, would share.

On the other hand, we shouldn't discount the possibility that there's loads of terrible stuff that might be said about each of them and which has been entirely inaccessible to me. Also, everything here could be totally accurate and underplayed. After all, they were Draft Board members, and they might be responsible for a lot more than we know. Every one of the five, we can recall, was zealously proud of their Selective Service activities, and we do not to this day have a full sense of the enthusiasm they may have brought to their work of coercing the youth of Sutter, Yuba, and Placer Counties into government-paid trips to Southeast Asia. So, the converse of the above is that just because no terrible atrocities are atrributed to them in these pages, let us not assume they didn't play their part and then some. There is certainly a possibility that the killer or killers might have had considerably greater knowledge about them than we do. Personal revenge may have played only a small role in the motives for these murders. I don't know, I'm just saying it could be. If that's the case, I'd like to think they'd recognize their responsibility to at least inform us of what those deeds requiring such drastic retribution might be, so that we no longer have to view these as totally senseless killings. For now, I thought it worth observing that we shouldn't go too far either in assuming they were wholly innocent victims, and the stuff to follow might be the nicest stories available about them. I don't know and I won't presume to guess. try only aim here is to qualify what I'm reporting on enough different ways so that nobody will hold me personally responsible for material which didn't originate with me anyway. All this stuff came from informed local people, and my part was only to record it. I should also make clear that none of what follows comes from things Michael Willetts said, except for one indirect report of a telephone conversation. His discussion of the Draft Board members remains intact in his interviews, and I'd like to add that there's nothing told to me by Sharon Willetts here either. I want to make that clear as I've probably caused her more than sufficient hurt already and have no desire to do any more damage. Anyway, to get back to the five, it could well be that they were genuinely horrible guys, and stories from Michael and Sharon didn't have to be included here for that pattern to emerge. I'm not judging either way.

For the sake of simple organization, I have grouped the stories according to the person they're principally about, and then follow those with a final section of either general stories or anecdotes not identified with any single person. As it was a nice order to cover the locations of their murders by the sequence of their deaths, I might as well keep their lives similarly arranged.

1. This first story is the most recent, concerning Dryden's insurance policy, which was, coincidentally, sold to him by Victim #4, David Smith. The $150,000 policy, not an unusual amount, had an apparently standard double indemnity clause upping the amount to $300,000 under a variety of circumstances, one of them being "Death by Non-Residential Fire", meant primarily to include hotel or auditorium fires, forest fires, things of that sort, excluding smoking in bed or other home fires. Dryden's widow, Mrs. Rebecca Anne Dryden, has put in a claim to Continental Life and Casualty of Northern California, invoking the double indemnity clause. Continental has denied the claim, stating their belief that death by napalm was not one of the forms of death intended to be covered by that clause. Mrs. Dryden has announced her plans to sue.

2. Dryden, you may recall, had just come from a farm labor contractor's office, one Manolo Fuentes by name. The odd connection here is that Fuentes was a peripheral figure in the Juan Corona case. Fuentes was handling contracts on some other workers picking walntits for the same rancher Corona had contracted to, and it was partly through Fuentes not being able to reconcile his accounts with the rancher that the names of the missing workers eventually led to Corona being suspected. Fuentes in no way appears to have been involved in illegal activities, but he sounds like an unlucky guy to hang around with very much. The other reason to mention this farm labor stuff is to point out the odd similarity in George Dryden leaving an office where he arranged for a group of workers to be sent to his ranch, and then meeting his death because of his Draft Board activities. Running a ranch and running a Draft Board might be somewhat parallel activities, two manpower problems that in Yuba City could turn out to be rather risky.

3. It has been reported to me that George Dryden kept large quantities of dehydrated food hidden on his ranch, together with a sizable cache of weapons. He was said never to travel further from his ranch than Yuba City, a trip of about fifteen miles, and he'd usually only do that for business reasons, as was the case on the day of his death. It was said that the only time he left California was during World War II, when he served in the Army Air Force as a B-17 navigator, shot down over Berlin, and a POW for two years. Returning home after the war, he never left the area again, and it appears he fortified his home in the event of attack or some sort of general collapse. I should add that this sort of castle mentality was not an unusual one in Yuba City. Michael Willetts gave another version of the same thing that had some effect upon him when we were in high school. The urge to be ready for Armageddon and to protect the area from the outside world is commonly held. In Dryden's case, considering that his death did come during one of his infrequent ventures off his private domain, that might not have been too stupid a philosophy.

Willis Neville - tractor and farm equipment dealer - strafed from airplane

1. An amusing idosyncracy of Neville's was the large supply of decals with his infantry insignia from World War II that he had made up, and that he tried to turn into something of a dealership trademark. They were from the 28th Batallion, which saw action primarily in Italy, and they show an outreached fist clutching a bolt of lightning. Neville loved to affix them to tractors on his lot, as are still plainly visible if you're in that neighborhood. If I need to stay in the pointing-out-irony business, I could indicate how he died within a few feet of one of those wartime nostalgia items. So Neville, like Dryden, might not have been so wrong in sensing that the war could wind up at his doorstep.

2. This is a quote from Neville, told to somebody I talked with who heard it when they appeared before the Draft Board on a deferment appeal. It is from memory and may not be exact, but the intended spirit is certainly captured. What he said, back in 1967, was "We took care of one slant-eyed bunch, now it's your turn." Funny thing about his saying this, apart from ways the quote speaks for itself, is that I doubt whether Neville encountered too many slant eyes in Italy.

3. The most interesting Neville story, and a pretty well-confirmed one at that, concerns his resignation in protest from the Marysville-Yuba City American Legion Post. In 1971, the organization drafted a statement supporting the position that veterans of Vietnam be afforded equal benefits with veterans of previous wars and armed conflicts. Neville was bitterly opposed, claiming that Vietnam was a "picnic" compared to what he and his fellow soldiers went through in World War II. The sense one gets of this story is that Neville may have been resentful even of draftees he was sending over there, for "getting" to fight in a war that wasn't up to the standards he believed were set in "his" war. As a result of this resignation, Neville was the only one of the five Draft Board members who at the time of his death belonged to no veterans organizations. I think it was still very much to the Legion's credit that when they offered their reward for the apprehension of the killer or killers of the Draft Board members that they did not exclude Neville from their list That's a very courteous extending of equal benefits, if you ask me.

David Smith - insurance agent - hand grenade in his car

1. Not surprisingly, a couple of the stories about Smith involve insurance matters. I'm sure it's an unfair generalization, but I've found it very often to be the case that insurance people have no other qualities to set themselves apart. If there aren't insurance stories about insurance agents, there are rarely stories at all. In any case, I'll use up the best one first here, and maybe my favorite of this entire group of little tidbits. It seems that in at least two instances, Smith contacted draftees who had previously come before him on appeals which turned out unsuccessfully. Smith did not identify himself as a Draft Board member, but called them a short time later to say that he was in insurance and he knew that they were coming on a time in their lives when he was sure they were especially concerned that their life insurance was adequate. In other words, Smith on some occasions, and I don't know how many, used his Draft Board position as a way to hustle up business for himself. I am not very familiar with the law, and I can't say with certainty that these stories are true, but that must be illegal conduct. I guess it doesn't matter much now, but I wonder if there were others on Draft Boards who might have taken similar advantage of their positions. I suppose in Yuba City they were lucky Smith wasn't a mortician instead of an insurance agent. As it was, he had no vested interest in seeing his boys come home dead.

2. The other insurance story about David Smith is a short, odd one. In one of your more classic cases of the shoemaker whose family went barefoot, Smith at the time of his death had no life insurance except for a government policy which was part of his veterans benefits. If he had a moment in his car between the time the hand grenade landed and the time it went off, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what passed through his mind.

3. The only evidence of a non-insurance existence for David Smith that came my way was the report that once things got hot in Vietnam, this would be about 1965, David Smith made an attempt to re-enlist. He was 43 at the time, with a family and a successful career. It could at least be said that he wasn't expecting of draftees anything he wasn't willing to do himself. Oh, because of his age and lack of specialized skills, his re-enlistment request was denied. Serving his country as a member of the Draft Board would be his form of contributing to the war effort, and as it turned out, his way of risking and losing his life.

Mitchell Ferguson - Assistant Superintendent of Schools - Impaled on spikes

1. It might be making too much of some school anecdotes to see them as indicators of what Mitchell Ferguson was like, but it wasn't hard to get a story or two about him. Apparently he was known as a pretty authoritarian personality who did find a few funny ways of expressing himself. A certain amount of this is likely typical in school administrators given responsibility for keeping order, but even for that unusual breed, Ferguson must have been a little bit towards the extreme end. One form of his fanaticism, quite legendary in Yuba City, was devoted attention to the high school parking lot. He instituted a student court to govern parking infractions, packed it with compliant student government goody-goody types, and through them and his own close supervision, meted out punishments following court hearings. These hearings began with guilty pleas, because the "expense" of conducting proceedings when a ticket was in dispute made Ferguson so mad he made sure the offended learned the lesson of never doubting his guilt, since in most cases Ferguson himself had issued the original citation, or approved its issuance by one of his student monitors. Some similarity to Draft Board methods in this quasi-judicial process can easily be inferred. I don't want to make too much of that myself, but I couldn't help but toss this in here. By the way, Ferguson was known to pay particular attention to failure to park between white lines (one week after-school detention the customary penalty), not locking your car (three days), and letting oil leak from your car and leave a stain on the ground (detention continuous until repair made). It has been suggested that the lot he so devoted attention to ought now be memorialized in his name, I'm sure it's an honor he would cherish.

2. One last school story. I don't want to pour it on too thick. In 1974, so I'm told, there was a big fight over band uniforms and Ferguson was in the middle of the fracas. Steve Gruenwald, music teacher and supervisor of the school marching band, had been instrumental in organizing a series of week-end car washes, candy sales, and other get-rich-quick schemes with the charitable purpose of purchasing new band uniforms, which theretofore hadn't been replaced since the big Twin Cities Flood of 1955, which had swept away all the band supplies, along with most of the town. Nineteen years is a long time for band uniforms, or for any kind of uniforms, I'm sure you'll agree. Mr. Gruenwald, having gone to all the effort to raise 100% of the funds, seeking no support from regular school budgets, went ahead after the money was raised and with the assistance of an elected committee of band members selected and ordered the new uniforms. So far so good, until Ferguson finds out that a teacher has spent student-collected funds without consulting him. Worse, Ferguson gets wind of the kind of uniforms that had been ordered and doesn't feel they were of appropriate design to represent the school. The way I heard it, while the color of the uniforms was right and "Honkers" was emblazoned on the back of each, Ferguson objected to their not being entirely "uniform". That is, different groups within the band would have some variation in their jackets, the drummers wearing one style, the trumpets and trombones another, and so on Ferguson was adamant about the requirement that every uniform had to be like every other. I know this sounds pretty stupid, but don't tell me you can't remember disputes from your high school days of similar magnitude. These can be very big deals, whether you believe me or not. Anyway, Ferguson sought to have Gruenwald suspended without pay for the balance of the school term, ostensibly over the money question, but acknowledging openly how upset he was about the way the uniforms were going to look and why hadn't they "sought his input". I'm told this was a serious town controversy, argued at a PTA meeting, talked about everywhere - you get the idea. It was finally resolved by Gruenwald caving in completely, publicly apologizing to Ferguson and agreeing that the first uniform plans were a mistake. The next year Gruenwald took a job at Ukiah, a smaller school further into the Northern California boondocks than even Yuba City, but presumably an institution allowing its band leader a greater degree of autonomy. Such was the iron will of Mitchell Ferguson. A joke that's gone around since Ferguson's death (and not an unfunny one I have to admit) is that the way the killer got Ferguson out to the football field in such a hurry on the morning he was lured to his death was to tell him that Mr Gruenwald had snuck back from Ukiah and was out behind the bleachers having the uniforms altered. That's Yuba City humor for you. Don't blame me for making that one up. I'm only telling you what I heard.

3. My one non-school story about Ferguson, just as I dug up one non-insurance anecdote about Smith, has to do with a protest he attempted to mount when the lottery was instituted in 1971 as a step in the draft. That was when everybody got numbers based upon the day of their birth, and those numbers determined the order within the year when you'd be drafted, so that if you had a high number you were pretty certain of never being called. Ferguson was a vocal opponent of this plan, as reported in an Independent-Herald story I have seen recently. The story told of him sending a telegram to President Nixon warning him of the likelihood that this would weaken national resolve in the fighting of the war because it told too many potential draftees that they were highly likely not to be needed. He said then that he much preferred a plan where everyone of draft age was kept in "continual awareness", I'm sure that was the phrase he used, that they could be called up. I guess that meant he wanted everyone scared that at any time they could get the "greetings" letter, and it really angered him to see even some eligible 1-A's told their chances of going in were extremely slim. (By the way, David Smith was also quoted in the article as opposing the lottery plan for "having statistical weaknesses", which he no doubt perceived through his actuarial experience, but I'd bet Ferguson rounded him up for support. None of the other three were quoted.) What's funny about the story is to see Ferguson making such a public flap over something he clearly couldn't control. He probably thought of the country as one big high school, and must have been surprised whenever his administrative expertise went unheeded.

Randall White - bank manager - killed by sniper's bullet

1. I've got one job-related story about White, and this is another one I know for a fact happened, because it involved a friend of mine. It's so lousy a thing for White to have done that I wouldn't repeat it unless I knew with some degree of certainty it was true. I never knew him or any of the five personally, but this story makes me glad never to have made his acquaintance. I had a friend who I shall not name here, who went to Sac State, now known as California State University at Sacramento. The nickname comes from the days when it was called Sacramento State College, before these fairly minor institutions got an inferiority complex and wanted to be called universities instead of colleges. That sounds about as earthshaking a complaint as Ferguson with his band uniforms, but that's what happened. Anyway, my friend was going to Sac State and preparing to study veterinary medicine, aided substantially in his educational pusuits by a loan he had taken out from Twin Cities Savings and Loan, the bank that Randall White came to manage. In 1968, White, as a policy decision it was stated, sought a bank review and subsequent reevaluation of their student loan programs. The result was that the bank called for immediate payment on a considerable number of their student loans. That is, they were cancelled forthwith in the middle of the school year, invoking a clause in each loan agreement which gave them that right. There were the expected complaints and protests, but the bank held firm. My friend tried to find other ways to get the money, without any success, so he cut his school course load to half-time and took a job, so as not to fall any deeper in debt than he already had. You can guess the next part. By not being a full-time student, he lost his II-S deferment, and about two months later got his induction notice. I won't go into the rest of the story, except to say that it doesn't end too terribly; my friend finished his veterinary studies last year, some time after he might have otherwise, but at least he did it. I was telling this only to get in print the information that White would manipulate loan policy to make students more vulnerable to being drafted. I guess in an odd way this is the reverse of what David Smith, the insurance agent, had pulled, in that here, White was giving up bank business in order to make people more draftable, where Smith was hoping to build business up. Either way, those are pretty low-down activities for Draft Board members to have been involved with. I don't know here either whether these practices were at all common, but I'd still think some illegality must have been committed I don't know, but it makes me pretty mad to hear stories like that. White doesn't deserve killing solely on those grounds, but it does make you wonder what kind of person would try stunts of this sort.

2. This one's almost too predictable, but here it is anyway. White had two sons, William and Randall Junior. I think William was about my age. If I'm remembering the right guy, and I'm pretty sure I am, he was an auto shop type, the kind who'd have been an athlete had he any ability at all, but in its absence became a typical sort of surly low-life, doing jock-type stuff without actually being a jock. Randall Junior was a couple of years younger and I didn't know him. The news on both is that they were never drafted. The rumor is, and I'll admit it's only a rumor until I find out the real story, but I heard that William got a deferment for working in a defense-related industry, a deferment that would be entirely unjustified, as William's last known employment was as a bartender in a Roseville bowling alley. The story on Randall Junior is that he's supposed to have never received notice of draft status because his file never found its way to the proper location at the Selective Service office. As I said, these are fairly nasty rumors, and I'm glad I won't be anywhere near Yuba City when these get aired in public, but if it turns out I'm wrong, I'll be the first to apologize. I know for sure William and Randall Junior never went in, and if they've got other stories about why they didn't, I'd love to hear what they have to say. Until then, it sure looks like having a father on the Draft Board didn't hurt them. Lucky too that they were smart enough not to have loans through their father's bank. The real story there is more likely they were too stupid to go to college, so they had no need for student loans. I guess they had no need for student deferments either.

Next I have a report about one of the five, but with no name attached to it, as it involves an unidentified telephone caller. Michael told about: this to somebody and they told me, and I'm going to repeat it: here rather than ask Michael for his version, both because this is where it belongs and since I don't know whether Michael would repeat it anyway. This happened a few months after Michael's draft problems were finally over, at least so far as his actually having to go in was concerned. (By that I mean you could say his draft problems never ended, if you wanted to put it that way.) Michael had been rejected by the Army psychiatrist he was sent to after his induction physical, and was now back in Yuba City. This would be about the time Sharon was pregnant, not that that's a part of the story. What takes place is that Michael gets a phone call one day, from a belligerent guy who keeps telling him he's heard how Michael managed to avoid being drafted.

Michael kept asking the guy who he was, and never got answers besides "you know who this is" or "what difference does it make" The guy said that the "finger stunt" was a smart angle for Michael to play, and how it was too bad "those assholes in Oakland" couldn't figure out what anybody in Yuba City would have been wise to in a minute. The guy kept ranting and raving, probably drunk Michael thought, but possibly very sober and extremely angry. With a warning to the effect that "don't think we'll ever forget this" the call was terminated Michael never found out who made that call, or at least that's the way he told the story some years later, but he did say he figured it must have been one of the Draft Board members, obviously frustrated over the matter having been taken out of their hands and their iron will thwarted by some big city technicality. It might also be that Michael made this whole story up, but I've got to say that based on what I've heard about these five, there's more than the ring of truth to it.

The final story is a nice way of tying this section together, if I do say so myself. The Independent-Herald had a clipping in its files dated March 26, 1973, called "The Day the Draft Ended." As before, I can only paraphrase here for the most part when really I'd prefer just to have reprinted the entire story, but I'm told legal restrictions apply here as well. To get around this, I'll devote most of the telling here to repeating direct quotes of public statements, as I'm informed those are permissible to reprint.

The article is about a testimonial dinner given by the Twin Cities Chamber of Commerce at the Uriz Hotel in Marysville on March 24 of that year to honor the members of the Draft Board and thank them for their service to the community. Two weeks earlier, by order of President Nixon, appointments to the Board were terminated, and it was announced that the offices themselves would close by late summer The Uriz is the fanciest place in the Twin Cities, at least it was then, very much the prestige location for important local social functions. The event got a full page in the paper with several photographs, well above the usual coverage. This was a big to-do, as they say around here. In fact, as they say around here too often. Local expressions are not particularly imaginative.

The festivities after dinner began with a speech by the mayor, then the reading of a commendatory telegram from General William B. Hershey, Selective Service Director, the handing out of Chamber of Commerce "Citation of Exceptional Local Merit" plaques, and finally expressions of thanks by each of the five Guests of Honor. Oh, a nice little touch was a speech by Cpl. Lance Backhouse, a Vietnam vet, member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and owner-operator of the Clark Street Car Wash. Yes, there really is a guy from here named Lance, whether you believe it or not. Lance's talk drew some laughter it was reported, when he identified himself as one of the few people in the room "on the barrel end of one of their orders." The gist of what he said was that as one cf the Vietnam draftees himself, he had come to appreciate what a.n important and difficult job the five men being honored had performed. This struck me as rather like having a convict show up at a judge's retirement party and thank him for meting out a twenty-to-life term, that it must have been hard for His Honor to pass sentence on him. Well, who am I to criticize.

I'd like to be reasonably faithful to the quotes from those thank you comments of each of the five. The newspaper story appears to have paid special attention to recording their statements properly, and I'd like to follow their lead. Also, as I said, I can do this without violating their rights to the story, as these speeches, since they were quoted, are public utterances. None of them had much to say, but what did issue forth that night is worth preserving. I don't know if Michael ever read this story, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to know a folded-up, faded copy of the same page I'm quoting from is stashed away someplace among Michael's mementos.

I'Il quote them in the same order as in the paper. I guess one time they can be listed in other than the sequence of their death It's a pleasant change of pace.

Mitchell Ferguson: As the last presiding Chairman of this Board, I'm proud to accept tonight's award. All five of us stood together for a long time, so it is indeed a pleasure to stand before you together this evening. I'm certain the judgementt of history upon us will say that we served honorably in a difficult period and did so with pride and courage. We shall hold our heads up high, secure in the knowledge that unlike so many of less faith and patriotism, our dedication to our country, our willingness to uphold its traditions, and our loyalty to our Commander-in-Chief, have never wavered. And finally, as Cpl. Backhouse so eloquently stated, I'd like to add my voice of appreciation to the vast majority from our area who answered who answered their country's call unswervingly. It was the sense of cooperation and support they demonstrated which made our job almost routine so much of the time.

George Dryden: Thank you. I hope you won't be needing us anymore, but I want you all to know I'm ready to do my duty and come back whenever there's a job to be done. Right now my prayers are with our POW's, and I don't mind saying if we in the military were left alone by those damned politicians, the whole war would have been over in less time than it took to serve up our chickens tonight. Heh, heh. I don't want to go off on a speech, but let's hope those Russians and Chinese learned something out of this thing. If they didn't, we'll go out next time and do it right. Randall White: I accept this honor with pride, not simply for myself, but as the demonstration of firm community support for our work which it stands for. We are part of you, and through us your will has been expressed. I am proud to have played my part, and I wish there was more that we, and the boys from this area, could have done to bring this war to an honorable and victorious end, Yuba City and Marysville and the area we served can point forever with pride, to the 100% effort we gave, because we always knew that our way of life was worth fighting for. I'd just like to add that we have been your Draft Board, the five of us here tonight, for over eight years. We have usually agreed upon matters before us, and I am personally very pleased to have had the opportunity to be associated with all the gentlemen, and soldiers, standing before you this evening.

Willis Neville: Well, you know how I feel, so there's not a lot I want to add. This war's not over as far as I'm concerned, and we're only kidding ourselves if we think the other side is ready to call it quits. Ending the Draft is a serious mistake, and I guarantee you we're all going to live to regret it. This war never had a chance to get under way. We never even got around to declaring it a war in the first place. What kind of a way is that to fight an enemy? I'm not going to make a speech either, but the way this is winding down is a damn shame. It's not too late to finish this thing right. Back in our war, the last real war, we knew how to do it. I'm running off at the mouth again. I do appreciate this plaque and I want to thank you.

David Smith: Thank you. We did a job that had to be done, and I'd just like to add how fortunate I feel to be part of a community which has always stood behind us so strongly. I feel sorry for the Draft Boards in areas full of troublemakers and cowards. Here in the backbone of America, a decent town and a fine place to raise our children, we never had much trouble like that and when we did we knew how to handle it. The people here are solid Americans ready to serve when called, and that's a big reason for why we're all so proud to be part of this community. This is a special place to live.

For this chapter at least, the five men now dead can have the last words.