Robert Cope, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Joel Calderon, [July 31, 2001]: Saving the legacy tape no. 278

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ROBERT L. COPE L 1 20 1 what they called "Gore Field. They had "Gore Field and th n they had th Air Base." And one of our jobs was - one of the jobs of Gore Field wa to s nd airplan over to Russia - over to Alaska and then across the Bering Sea and then over to Russia. The ones they sent is what they called "P-39," and then later they called them the P-63 which was a different version of what was approximately the same airplane. Well anyway, I stayed there until the war was almost over and just before the war ended they transferred me to Salt Lake City, and it was in Salt Lake City that I was discharged, after about four years in the service. I was in what the called the "Flight Service," the "Army Flight Service" all the time. And we would advise the pilots at weather conditions, and we would clear the pilots off from fields that didn't have any clearing authority. That's the way I spent most of my time. I might say that shortly after I left Florida, and OCS, I was sent to Winston-Salem North Carolina for training and also other work that we had to do there. And then, after that, it was to Flushing, New York. And after Flushing, New York, then it was to Great Falls, Montana. And Great Falls, Montana, is where I spent most of the time. I guess most of the interesting situations in the service in our family was experienced by my brothers -I'll have to look to see which ones went where. My oldest brother, George Denzel Cope, he got to be a dentist and he was in the Medical Corps. And he went over to - in the Pacific - and was in Japan for a considerable part of the time practicing dentistry. 5