Robert Keith "Scotty" Allan, Magna, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, August 11, 2004: Saving the Legacy tape no. 697

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He made a liaison officer out of me up there. I went down to th Japan Seventeenth Army Headquarters there in Seoul. They had a big headquarter . o I g t a language officer as an interpreter. His name was Joe Boswell. He looked just like Harold Lloyd, you know, the movie comedian with the big horn rimmed glasses. He was about as funny. He was a Harvard graduate and he'd learned Japanese as a hobby when he was a kid. He could read it and write it. You could get interpreters and stuff but he wrote the surrender document when we went to Korea for them to sign. He was a brilliant kid but he was funny. He had a tender stomach and we weren't supposed to fraternize, as they called it, with the enemy. We were just supposed to keep track of them. I went down there. The first day I went in, there was a big, good-looking Japanese lieutenant who came out and saluted me and told me what his name was and all that stuff and I talked to him a minute in English. Boswell sat there and listened to him. So I finally said to him, "Where are you from, anyway? You speak American. You don't speak English." All the English that the Japanese knew they got from the Australians. So the ones who'd been taught English in Japan all spoke the King's English. They'd have instructors come from Australia. You could tell them, the Japanese who spoke the King's English and the ones who spoke American. So I said to him, "Where are you from, anyway?" He said, "Well, I'm from Long Beach." I said, "What the hell are you doing over here?'' He said, "Well, before the war, the family moved back here and they drafted me." So anyway, I said, "Did you go to Long Beach High School?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Did you know Georgia Bluccark?" He said, "Yes, I graduated with her." She was a girlfriend I used to go with in Los Angeles. 19