Oral Histoy of Childhood on the Mission Field in Korea

· Tim Hopper

Oral Histoy of Childhood on the Mission Field in Korea
Part 8 of 11 in the series Mission to Korea

My dad David Hopper, his brother Barron Hopper, his sisters Alice Dokter and Margaret Faircloth grew up in Jeonju, South Korea where their parents were missionaries with the southern presbyterian church (PCUS). On January 5, 2023, I got them all in a room together to share memories of their childhood.

You can listen to the four parts of the interview below.

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Here are links to some things mentioned in the interview:

Transcripts

These transcripts are lightly edited for readability. Timestamps restart with each part and follow the published audio. Uncertain wording is marked in brackets.

Transcript: Part 1, Childhood in Korea

Tim Hopper (00:00): As a start, let’s have you each introduce yourselves. We can go oldest to youngest and tell name and when and where you were born.

Alice Dokter (00:09): Okay, my name is Alice Dokter, Alice Ruth Hopper Dokter, and I was born in Roanoke, Virginia. My parents were ministering in Callaway, Virginia, and so I was born in Virginia and went to Korea very early on. I was about a year and a half when we went to Korea.

Barron Hopper (00:38): Well, I go by Barron, my middle name, and I’m Joseph Barron Hopper. I’m a junior, the same name as my father. I was born in Chonju, Korea, after my parents went there as missionaries, probably about a year before I was born. But I was born in 1948 there. So that was my start.

David Hopper (01:13): And you were the first American child born in Korea?

Barron Hopper (01:19): I think I was, yeah.

David Hopper (01:20): After the Korean War, after World War II.

Barron Hopper (01:22): After people came back after the war, I think I was maybe the first one born, is my understanding.

David Hopper (01:28): And I’m David Hershey Hopper. I would have been born in Korea, but I was born in Richmond, Virginia, after my folks evacuated when the Korean War started June 25th. I was born September 14th, 1950, in Richmond, Virginia. The women of the church had some homes and apartments there. And when my folks reached the West Coast, they had found an open apartment there. I think my Longenecker grandparents were there, so they went there and I was born.

We stayed in Richmond only that first year of my life, so I really have no tie to my hometown, birthplace town.

Margaret Faircloth (02:26): I am Margaret Lois Hopper Faircloth, and I was born in Chonju, Korea, after the Korean War in 1955. I was delivered by Paul Crane by flashlight and assisted by Janet Keller on a snowy January day. I think my mother fell on the way to the hospital.

David Hopper (02:52): That explains some things.

Alice Dokter (02:55): Well, the reason she fell was we had very thoughtfully salted the sidewalk, and it melted the snow and then refroze.

Grandparents and family background

Tim Hopper (03:07): So your parents were missionaries in Korea with the Southern Presbyterian Church, but you also came from two sets of grandparents who were Southern Presbyterian missionaries as well. Can one of you give some background on your maternal grandparents, the Longeneckers?

David Hopper (03:23): Well, yeah, go ahead.

Barron Hopper (03:27): Well, they were missionaries in Belgian Congo for about 30 years, I think. Well, that was the short story.

David Hopper (03:42): Grandfather was from Pennsylvania Dutch country, Hershey Longenecker, and Minnie Hauhart Longenecker was from the Midwest, from Missouri. Missouri. They had gone to the Congo at a difficult time at the end of World War I, but they served there, and Mama was raised most of her childhood years in the Congo.

They had to leave in about 1950 because of Grandfather’s diabetes. He must have started on insulin when he got to the States, which must have been a brand new deal at that time, but he couldn’t go back to the Congo and receive that.

Tim Hopper (04:53): Interesting, at least interesting to me, that Hershey and Minnie were not Presbyterians by upbringing. They both grew up in Christian homes, but became committed Presbyterians and served with the PCUS mission in Congo.

David Hopper (05:08): Yeah, there’s a lot of the history on that recorded in Grandfather Longenecker’s autobiography, Memories of Congo.

Tim Hopper (05:22): Maybe Alice, could you give some background on your paternal grandparents, the Hoppers?

Alice Dokter (05:25): My grandmother was from Rock Hill, South Carolina. She was a Barron, Annis Barron, and I don’t remember if she had a middle name or not. She must have, being in the South. But anyway, Grandfather Longenecker, Grandfather Hopper, was from Kentucky, from Stanford, Kentucky.

It still amazes me that Grandmother’s parents would allow a young girl from a small Southern town to go heaven knows where. I mean, Korea was the hermit kingdom, so nobody knew much about it. She would have had to cross the sea with Grandfather, cross the United States, and then get on a ship and go all the way over to a foreign country that no one knew much about, and there was no way to communicate with except by ship mail.

But they served in the south end of Korea in Mokpo. Grandfather went up to Pyongyang, which is now the capital of North Korea, and taught at the seminary there, the theological seminary there in North Korea. Grandmother was very instrumental in teaching English to a number of people. I know somebody now who is a friend of a man who was taught by my grandmother in Mokpo, and he became the editor of the Seoul newspaper and was very prominent, maybe still is, but probably is retired in South Korea.

So she homeschooled all of her kids, and she was amazing, and my grandfather was amazing.

David Hopper (07:38): Let me just throw in a couple things on him. He was apparently a tremendous theologian. He wrote a commentary on Isaiah which was ultimately translated into Korean and published in Korea. But he did teach at the seminary in Seoul, just in Pyongyang, just a couple of semesters. And later when the seminary had fled to Korea, Daegu, he taught there.

But one of the interesting little stories that I don’t know is recorded anywhere on him: he did a lot of rural evangelism and went to some of the islands around the Korean archipelago there off of Mokpo. But somewhere, when he went into, or when he was leaving a village, he stole the devil’s post from outside the village. Now, they had little totem pole-like devil’s posts outside the villages, and he stole one of them.

Alice Dokter (08:51): How did you learn that?

David Hopper (08:53): I remember Grandmother telling me that, but I don’t know the details on that at all. But it upset a lot of people, apparently.

Alice Dokter (09:04): Well, what would he do with it when he got it back home?

David Hopper (09:06): I don’t know. I don’t know where it went. Burned it. But the little spirit post, he stole from (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (09:14): Well, let me also tell one story that I heard many, many years later when I was in Knoxville. I was in a ministers’ group that would meet every month or something. And one of the ministers said, oh, was I the son of the Hoppers? And I said, well, he was talking about my grandparents. I said, “No, I’m his grandson.”

He said, well, in World War II, he had been down in, I think, one of the Japanese islands, and they were holding (interrupted).

David Hopper (09:46): It was in the South Pacific, wasn’t it?

Barron Hopper (09:47): What?

David Hopper (09:48): I think he had said in the South Pacific area.

Barron Hopper (09:52): Okay, well, anyhow, he was in the Chaplains Corps, and one of the chaplains stood up in the back of a truck to teach or preach to a large group of Korean prisoners, prisoners of war there. So he said, “Well, is there anyone here that can translate for me?” Yes. And one man came forward.

Later he asked him, “Well, how’d you learn, where’d you learn English?” Well, he had learned it from Grandmother Annis Barron. So I thought that was pretty remarkable.

David Hopper (10:33): Yeah, the Koreans were taken as slave laborers for these islands that the Japanese had captured. And so anyway, that’s fascinating.

Margaret Faircloth (10:50): I didn’t know Grandfather because by the time I came along, he had had a nervous breakdown. And I just sort of knew him as someone who followed my grandmother around. She had always struck me as a little bit severe. I think I was a little afraid of her.

But I remember one time my cousin Charlotte and I were sitting on the back steps of the Montreat house. Right. And Grandmother came out and sat down with us and was talking with us. And she said, “I wish you could have known your grandfather. He was a wonderful man, so fun, and he would make us laugh and sing and play games.”

I’ve always just remembered that moment both as a tender side of my grandmother and also as who my grandfather really was that I never (interrupted). Right.

David Hopper (11:47): I think it was probably a major PTSD-triggered depression that he had, that you would call it nowadays. Called a mental breakdown then, but just threw him into severe, severe depression that he never really came out of. And that was partly the consequence of returning to Korea, and so many of his seminary students and pastor friends had been killed by the occupying Japanese in World War II. And then later the communists slaughtered, mass slaughtered the Christian leadership.

Tim Hopper (12:29): Annis was Annie Estelle, or Annie, is that right? I just looked it up. Not Annie, yeah, Annie Estelle Barron. Annis was her nickname.

Margaret Faircloth (12:40): Really? Didn’t know that.

Tim Hopper (12:42): I think another interesting thing about your Hopper grandparents is Joseph was from Kentucky, rural Kentucky. Annis was from Rock Hill, South Carolina, which is now the Charlotte metro, but was probably a pretty small town back then. But they met in New York City because they went to New York City to this White’s Bible Institute to train for the mission field. And they met in New York City, which seems remarkable to me for two young Southerners.

I think, if memory serves, Annis was hoping to go to Egypt with the United Presbyterian Church Mission in Egypt, which was a very large mission. She came from the ARP Church, which had historic connection to the United Presbyterian Church. But they got married and ended up in Korea. Yeah.

Which actually brings us well to our next thing of how your parents met. So two kids, one grew up in Congo, one grew up in Korea, how they met and ended up back in Korea.

Alice Dokter (13:44): They met in Montreat. Montreat was the conference center for the denomination, and missionary children typically went there because they didn’t have parents to go home to during the summertime, and they were used as workers for the conference center. So my mother was there, and there was a home established, I think, by the women of the General Assembly. It was called Collegiate Home, and it was for college students to stay where they could work for the community, work for the Montreat Conference Center, and stay there and have meals and all for free. But because the missionaries from different countries stayed there, they made friendships and so forth.

Mama considered Daddy a friend. But she began to be suspicious when he drove quite a long distance from wherever it was he was to Blackstone, Virginia, where she was working as the director of Christian education in a small church. Daddy drove there when gas was rationed. Mm-hmm. The purpose, ostensibly, of the trip was to tell her about Aunt Martia, his sister’s wedding. And she found that very suspicious.

I don’t know exactly how the proposal happened, but she was on her way to Congo, had already been given some lovely suitcases with her initials on them. The initials were in gold. I remember seeing the suitcase, and she was most embarrassed then when it turned out she would be going to Korea with my father rather than going to Africa to teach French.

Tim Hopper (16:02): So you said they started in Korea in 1949, is that right?

Barron Hopper (16:08): No, ‘47.

Alice Dokter (16:11): No, not ‘47. ‘47 was when I was born.

Barron Hopper (16:13): Well, I was born in Korea in ‘48, so it was before ‘48.

Tim Hopper (16:19): Okay.

Barron Hopper (16:19): Or early ‘48, maybe.

Tim Hopper (16:22): Very good.

Margaret Faircloth (16:23): It would be in their book, Daddy’s memoirs. Yep.

Barron Hopper (16:26): It must have been early 1948 or something like that. But in any case, then I was born, and before long, the Korean War started, see, in 1950, in June of 1950. So they were just there a couple of years, and then this war started, and so they were out.

Alice Dokter (16:50): I remember going into the hospital to see Barron, my little baby brother. I remember walking in at the foot of Mama’s bed and not being particularly interested in the baby, but being more interested in the new doll that they gave me that was lying on the bottom of Mama’s feet. And so I was introduced to Barron, but he did not impress me very much.

Barron Hopper (17:23): Well, such is life.

Early memories of Korea

Tim Hopper (17:27): That’s a good story. What are, for each of you, some of your earliest memories of Korea?

Barron Hopper (17:35): Well, I had no memories before the war, and so Alice was the only one would have had any.

David Hopper (17:42): Did you remember Japan?

Barron Hopper (17:43): Yeah. Did you remember Japan?

David Hopper (17:46): No.

Barron Hopper (17:46): That was some of my early (interrupted). See, after the war, we came back to Korea in what, 1953? Well, ‘53, we came back to Japan. We couldn’t go back into Korea yet, and it was still guerrilla warfare going on and things like that. So we were in Japan for, I think, about six months, and I can remember that, various things about it. I remember we had a Korean woman, I mean, a Japanese woman working for us. Yeah.

Alice Dokter (18:24): Tomiko-san.

Barron Hopper (18:24): Yeah, Tomiko. She would take me on the bus when she would go to buy vegetables and things like that for our family. Did you travel with her on the bus?

Alice Dokter (18:36): I don’t remember. We used to ride on the train because we would memorize the stops. They would call out the stops, and I used to remember what they were, but they would call out the stops on the Japanese train.

But I remember getting to Yokohama. We rode the ship over there, and Barron and David did not like the food, and so they lived on, if you can believe this, ketchup sandwiches crossing the ocean.

Barron Hopper (19:14): Okay.

Alice Dokter (19:15): And there was a lady named Mrs. Crabtree. Mrs. Crabtree. She had a birthday that was skipped because we crossed the International Date Line. And the ship’s cooks were very upset about this woman missing her birthday, so they baked the largest cake I have ever seen to this day. They baked it in a washtub. So here was this huge cake. I don’t remember what it tasted like, I just remember the size.

Tim Hopper (19:52): So were there other missionaries in Japan as well for the time that you spent there?

Alice Dokter (20:00): There were. There were some waiting to get into Korea. I ended up having an earache one night in my right ear, and it became so intense that Mama called the doctor, Dr. David Seel, that was waiting to go into Korea. And he came across Tokyo in a Jeep, not a Jeep, a taxi, and took me with him to the Seventh-day Adventist Hospital where he lanced my ear.

Barron Hopper (20:39): Huh.

Alice Dokter (20:40): And I just went with him. Mama had to stay home with the two boys.

He lanced my ear, and thereafter, for a week or more, he would come every day and hold his watch up to my ear and ask if I could hear it. And then the next day, he would hold it a little bit farther away and a little bit farther away. I have never had problems with hearing in that ear, or either ear, to my knowledge.

But that always impressed me that he would come all the way across. It was in the wintertime, and it was very cold. And he took care of me, and I survived.

Barron Hopper (21:26): Huh. I can remember other missionaries there, too. We would get on a military bus, I think it was, go to a military base for worship services on Sunday. And we would see some of the other missionaries that I would know later in Korea there.

David Hopper (21:46): I don’t remember Japan, but I know that several of the, I’ll say, kids that I grew up with in Korea were in Japan at the same time. The Lintons were there. Yeah,

Barron Hopper (22:05): I remember playing with Dave Linton and getting all muddy out in the yard. And I remember, you remember Debbie Crim?

David Hopper (22:12): Yeah.

Barron Hopper (22:13): Well, that family was there because I remember she had the same birthday that I did, so we celebrated those together. So anyhow,

David Hopper (22:22): Daddy hitchhiked rides back from Korea a couple of times to see us in Japan. And I recently learned from a cousin of mine that the planes that they would hitchhike rides on were CIA planes.

Tim Hopper (22:48): That’s wild.

David Hopper (22:51): That took a run back and forth from Kunsan Air Base (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (22:57): How did he figure that out?

David Hopper (22:59): To Japan? Well, a certain individual who has access to that kind of information told me that.

Alice Dokter (23:05): Inside information.

Tim Hopper (23:07): Dad and Aunt Margaret, do you have some early memories in Korea?

Margaret Faircloth (23:12): My first memory was from when I was about three and a half years old and we were leaving to come home on furlough. It would have been my first time coming to the United States, and I’d been told about this but didn’t really understand it. I remember as we were leaving, they were loading up the car and stuff, and I was sitting on the swing on our big front porch with Pong Soon-ee, who was our kind of nanny, and crying because I was going to be leaving her. So that’s a snapshot in my mind. Yeah.

And then I remember when we got to the States and we’re staying in a house in Montreat, and I remember thinking Americans were really stupid because I had grown up in a bilingual home and people in America just didn’t understand this other language. And I just thought that was really ridiculous.

David Hopper (24:09): I forgot to say my first memories. If they’re correct, my first memory is driving up to Chonju Station when we arrived there, and forsythia were blooming on the bank below our house, between our house and the Linton home, and that’s my earliest memory.

Barron Hopper (24:34): And I remember moving in with two single ladies. We moved into the house with Miss (interrupted). Is that not right?

Alice Dokter (24:43): I just don’t remember it.

Barron Hopper (24:45): Well, it was Bill Green and Miss Fontaine were living in a house, and our house was occupied by the American military.

Alice Dokter (24:55): Oh, that may be.

Barron Hopper (24:56): What?

Alice Dokter (24:56): That probably is.

Barron Hopper (24:58): I didn’t remember that. Well, so we were put in that house, and I just remember that. And then the famous thing happened where these were American military officers in our house, and Daddy kept trying to get them out. For a while, they wouldn’t leave. And so he sent in a team to go ahead and start remodeling the house with them in it, and they quickly left. And

Alice Dokter (25:27): he pulled down the ceiling.

Barron Hopper (25:28): Yeah, but so I dubbed one of them, well, there must have been a woman there too, one of the nurses. Her name was Ms. Vanderplast or something. I dubbed her Ms. Vanderplaster because they pulled the plaster all down around them.

Life in Chonju

Tim Hopper (25:47): Dad, you’ve had the opportunity to visit Chonju in more recent years and it’s changed a lot, but what was Chonju, which is on the southwest side of Korea, what was it like in the 1950s, post-Korean War?

David Hopper (26:01): Even though Korea is one of the most modern countries in the world now, it was very, very third world, post-war, extreme poverty when we were there. But Chonju was a city of, I think, 150,000 to 200,000 people at that time. But it was a small town in Asia. Yeah. It was all tucked in one valley.

The early missionaries, which had come there in the 1890s, had not been allowed to live inside the walled city and had been given this hill across the river as a place that they could stay. And so that’s where the mission work had been developed. Over the years, the land was protected by the missionaries, so it was the only nicely wooded mountain hillside there at the edge of the city, and the Koreans all wonder why the Americans got the best place.

But for us growing up, there were no tall structures. There was a big Catholic church across town, but it had an old city gate, but it was inside the town at that point down near the marketplace. That one city gate was still standing. Yeah. We lived on this hill on the outskirts of town, and the mission hospital was located adjacent to it.

The hill had on it half a dozen missionary homes built from the 1920s on, and we were in an old Southern-style, two-story brick house. Yes. Square home. Go in, Daddy’s study was kind of a big room on the right. On the left was a living room. Behind that was a dining room, and back right was the kitchen. Stairs went straight up the middle, and upstairs you had four bedrooms.

So it looked like an old brick home on the street of any good Southern town because all the missionaries were Southern Presbyterians, were mostly Southern Presbyterian, a little bit upper-classy type people had gone into the mission. So that’s what the house was like in the town, but it was safe. We were a fenced community. I had a gatekeeper. But we could go places.

Alice Dokter (29:14): The hill we were on had run originally over into other hills, and they had cut the road through, which meant you could come to the end point of our station and look down into the crevice that was cut through. I mean, there were steep sides on either side of the road. And it was in those places that the beggars would live. They would cut back into the dirt and make a cave.

I remember Barron and David coming back to a meal one time, and Barron was laughing because he had seen a beggar go off to work. The man came out of his cave, and instead of washing his hands and face before he went to work, he grabbed up some dirt and smushed his hands together and rubbed it on his clothes and his face and everything. And then instead of his briefcase, he picked up a number 10 can, which was a large can that the military had used. Yeah. That had a metal handle on it, a wire handle across the top. And then he went off to beg.

There were a lot of beggars, and there were a lot of people who lived under the bridge that went from our side of the river into the main part of the town. They lived under shacks of all kinds. Originally, they would live under cardboard roofs under the bridge. Eventually, they began to scavenge from the military and use the beer cans, flatten them out, and make them into corrugated roofs. So you would see roof tiles, beer can roofs. They were corrugated, and they went up and down just like corrugated metal does. But they had Pabst and Blue Ribbon and Budweiser and everything like that. Eventually, of course, they also had Coca-Cola. But every time there would be a flood, there would be loss of life, people sleeping under the bridge. Yeah.

And under the bridge was also where women did their washing, or in that river. I never could understand how clothes came out clean, because it didn’t appear to be clean water to me. But they would take out their washing and put it on a rock and beat it with two sticks.

I later learned one time when I was visiting Pong-Sunee, the woman that Margaret referred to as our babysitter. I was [unclear] her, and their grandmother lived with them. And she was doing the ironing, which consisted of a flat rock that had been actually smoothed out somewhat. They had a sort of a folded sheet, it looked like, that was in the rock. And then they put the clothes on top of that and beat it with two sticks, and there was a rhythm to it. Right. And she let me practice until I got the rhythm right of beating the clothes on the (interrupted). I doubt if I was very good.

But they also had what was known as a sad, I don’t know how you spell it, but I would spell it S-A-D, iron. It was a tiny little iron that they put charcoal in. And so, oh, wow, it would be like we would consider a kettle, except it was shaped like an iron, and you put the charcoal in the top. And then while it was hot, then you did the ironing to get the wrinkles out.

Tim Hopper (33:24): Margaret, you talked about speaking Korean, and how were you learning Korean as young children? Is it just from being around the Korean staff on the compound,

Barron Hopper (33:35): or

Tim Hopper (33:35): was there any formal instruction?

Barron Hopper (33:37): No, and particularly from the people that helped us in our home. We had a cook and this bongsuni who did wash and took care of the kids and did various things.

David Hopper (33:49): Learned by immersion?

Barron Hopper (33:51): Yeah.

Alice Dokter (33:52): What?

David Hopper (33:53): We were language immersion. That’s, you know, immersion. That’s how they recommend people learn languages.

Barron Hopper (33:59): I don’t remember not being able to speak it, although I think I must have learned some before the war when I was one and a half. And then I came back, and I don’t remember not being able to speak.

Alice Dokter (34:14): Bong Soon-hee would carry us on her back, and then she would stand and talk to us as she looked out over the city. And I don’t remember what she said, but she would repeat stuff over and over again.

But when I first went, I was a year and a half when we got there. And because children are not afraid to make mistakes, they learn to use their language more quickly. So my mother would tell me what to tell the cook to make for lunch, and I would hear it in English, run through the swinging door into the kitchen, and tell it to her in Korean, get her answer, and come back and translate it back into English. Mm-hmm. The flexibility.

But when we got to the States on evacuation, apparently I refused to perform for people. People that didn’t speak Korean, I would not speak Korean to. They would say, “Say something, say something.” So it was always the habit of Daddy, and it was later too, to get us kids to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” I remember one time in Quitman when I was in kindergarten, standing up on a chair in some type of a meeting of men, standing up by Daddy at a luncheon and singing “Jesus Loves Me.”

School, food, and daily routines

Tim Hopper (35:51): What would have been a normal day for you as children? I mean, all of you ended up in boarding school later on, and we’ll talk about that in a bit, but just around Chonju, up through fifth or sixth grade, whenever you’d go off to boarding school, what would a day have been like?

Barron Hopper (36:12): Well, I know David and I spent an awful lot of time outside in the yard and beyond.

David Hopper (36:24): We knew the hill like the back of our hands. We knew every tree.

Barron Hopper (36:27): Yeah.

Alice Dokter (36:28): And what was in the tree, what nest was in the tree.

Barron Hopper (36:32): There were a lot of fruit trees in our yard, actually, that the missionaries must have planted 20, 30 years ago before. And I can tell you where each tree was and what fruit they had. I mean, there was a quince tree and a cherry tree and a chestnut tree.

David Hopper (36:55): There was a pomegranate.

Barron Hopper (36:56): Pomegranate tree.

Alice Dokter (36:57): I don’t remember a pomegranate tree.

Barron Hopper (36:59): Anyhow, it wasn’t a big, big fruit tree. No, it was a little bush. Anyhow,

Margaret Faircloth (37:05): did you get pomegranates off it? I don’t remember.

Barron Hopper (37:06): But we spent lots of time out in the yard, Tim, and we’d play games there. The Korean children, some of the boys knew us and they would come and play with us. I mean, I don’t know, as Alice said, we were kind of a gated community. But everybody seemed to be able to come in whenever they wanted.

Tim Hopper (37:25): Were there other American children on the compound?

Barron Hopper (37:28): They were younger than Alice and me always.

Alice Dokter (37:30): Yeah.

David Hopper (37:31): Ginger Crane was the only one my age, and there were some others younger. There were, like I say, around a half dozen homes, and some of the missionaries were long-term. We were maybe the most consistent, one of the most consistent stay-in-Chonju-the-whole-time family. Um-hmm.

The Cranes were there some of the time, and they had six kids. One passed away, but the oldest was my age. And they left for a time, then came back. The Seels came a little later. They had a son that was three years younger than me and a daughter that was Margaret’s age and another child. The Moores were there for a time, and David Moore was probably a couple years younger than me.

Barron was the oldest boy around always, and Alice always the only oldest girl. You never had a peer on Chonju Station.

Alice Dokter (38:50): No,

David Hopper (38:51): no. Neither of y’all did.

Barron Hopper (38:53): But then, as far as the missionary community, there was one house that was dedicated to some of the nurses. They were all women, single women, and then another house had teachers who were women at the Bible school. And there was an older couple, the Lintons, right across the street from us, that they were like grandparents to us, kind of. There was Bob Smith, who was a bachelor. And anyhow, so there would be various, various.

Alice Dokter (39:28): They didn’t have a bachelor’s house, but the places where the single women lived were referred to as the single ladies’ houses. And, “Oh, that’s a single lady’s house,” and that was how they were referred to.

But I want to start with how our day started. It did not matter the age we were. It did not matter where we were. This would be on board ship. This would be wherever, in the mountains, at home. We always started with morning prayers. And that meant Daddy would read from the Bible that he had. He read straight on through.

One notable time was when he got his words twisted, and he was talking about Judas’ last days, and he said, “And the rope broke, and his gowls bushed out.” Of course.

Barron Hopper (40:34): His gowls.

Alice Dokter (40:35): Yeah, he swapped the B and the G. And so I remember that. But we learned all verses of many, many hymns because Daddy played the piano. And when he wasn’t there, Mama played the piano. Mama would usually read to us from a Bible storybook. She usually read to us at night. But every morning we sang.

I remember wondering about that, wondering what the other people on the ship thought when we would be singing, because our cabins were right off the main lobby. And not everybody was a missionary that was going on the ship with us. I remember Daddy taught us, “Jesus, Savior, pilot me over life’s tempestuous seas,” when we were getting ready to go into a port. He explained what the pilot did.

And then later, my mother took us up on the deck above the captain to watch us go into the harbor of Yokohama. It was cold because we were at the front of the ship and it was blowing into our [unclear], and our feet were approximately level with that of the captain on the deck below.

And Mama started us with this chant from Winnie-the-Pooh: “The more it snows, tiddly-pum, the colder it grows, tiddly-pum.” Our voices, of course, rose with each phrase until finally the captain turned around and glared at my mother and said, “Madam, can you keep those children quiet?” And we all silently filed down and went back into our cabin.

David Hopper (42:32): Well, back to the devotions. Daddy always prayed at the end of devotions. I don’t think we all prayed. I think it was always Daddy. Daddy prayed. But morning devotions was a routine thing.

We would have breakfast. I’m thinking in terms of when we’re in Chonju. We’d have breakfast, sometimes eggs, a lot of times cereal. The cereal was puffed rice primarily. You had this (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (43:12): Or hot cereal.

David Hopper (43:13): Two hot cereals. Or hot cereal.

Margaret Faircloth (43:15): Two hot cereals.

David Hopper (43:16): Two hot cereals, yeah, the ground wheat and the

Alice Dokter (43:20): millet.

David Hopper (43:21): But the puffed rice, the rice was taken downtown to this guy that pulled his cart around the town, would puff the rice for you. Now, Tim, you wouldn’t remember, but back in the ’60s and all, the ads on TV for Pop Rice as blown from a gun.

Well, this guy had a little round bomb-looking cylinder. The two halves would, or the door or something on it would, bolt tight shut, and it was on a crank. He would crank it over a little charcoal. He put the rice in it. Yeah. Crank it over a little charcoal fire, had a big screen basket at the end of the cart.

He had a pressure gauge on there. When the pressure got to a certain place, he would flip the handle that allowed the container to blow open, and it was like popcorn. Oh, wow. A bowl full of popcorn all popping at once. It would go bang, blow out the puffed rice into this bag. And that’s where our puffed rice cereal (interrupted). You remember that?

Alice Dokter (44:50): I never saw that. It just makes me sick to think I never took advantage of that.

David Hopper (44:57): And anyway, so that’s puffed rice. We had puffed rice and we always had milk to eat on our cereal or drink, because we were the only people who had a cow. We had a dairy cow, one of two or three dairy cows in a city of almost a quarter of a million then, that Daddy had gotten somewhere.

Alice Dokter (45:26): Daddy got our first cow from the grandparents.

Barron Hopper (45:29): I thought the first cow survived the war, didn’t it?

Alice Dokter (45:33): He was the grandparents’ cow in Mokpo.

Barron Hopper (45:36): And the man we had working for us happened to know how to take care of a cow, so he got the cow.

Alice Dokter (45:44): And there was a barn.

Barron Hopper (45:45): So we had a barn.

David Hopper (45:47): We always had fresh milk. We’d pasteurize it by boiling it on the stove, and eventually they got a little pasteurizer container to put it in. Then you put it in the refrigerator and the cream would rise to the top, and you scoop the cream off. And that’s what we made butter with, just shaking it back and forth in a quart jar sitting on the swing on the porch. And I never liked butter. Still don’t like it.

Margaret Faircloth (46:18): Really? Interesting.

David Hopper (46:21): But we always had (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (46:22): David doesn’t like butter.

David Hopper (46:23): We have ice cream. We were the people who could fix good ice cream because we had a crank churn that our (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (46:33): We didn’t fix it.

David Hopper (46:35): The man that worked for us would have a guy from the ice house downtown bring a big chunk of ice up on the back of his bicycle, and we’d crack it up with a hammer on the back steps

Barron Hopper (46:50): and, but that one cow would always produce more milk really than we needed. Sometimes in our hospital there would be a baby born, and I don’t know what would happen, but maybe the mother didn’t get her milk or something.

David Hopper (47:02): Or died.

Barron Hopper (47:03): Or died, and so we would then provide milk for the baby, or some of the other missionary families might have a similar situation, so the milk got around, you know.

Margaret Faircloth (47:14): We supplied milk, I think, to all of the American houses on the compound.

David Hopper (47:19): When we had abundance, yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (47:21): In those days, I don’t think the Koreans drank much milk.

Alice Dokter (47:24): They didn’t drink milk, but Mama would have a quart jar that was always sterilized that she could give milk. I don’t know if we actually tithed it or what, but we would learn about babies in the village that were being starved because all they could drink was just the leftover rice water. When you cooked rice, there would be some left in the bottom, and you’d put water in it and boil it and stir it up so it would be a very loose gruel that babies could be fed through a bottle, but it would not be very nourishing.

So our milk was provided for women. They would come up and bring the bottle back, and it would be re-sterilized. Right. And a fresh bottle of milk would be given to them. And so we didn’t touch, when it was in the refrigerator, it would be in a quart jar or Mason jar. And so that would be for the ladies who would come to the back door and be given the milk.

David Hopper (48:34): Mama had a group of ladies up to the house one time, to the newer house later on. And after the ladies left, she had opened all the windows to air it out because the Koreans had a kimchi smell to them. Somebody had forgotten her purse or something, came back up to the house to get it, and found Mama opening up and airing the place all out and said, “Oh, you do that after we’ve been in your house. After you’ve been in our houses, we have to air it out because Americans smell like milk.” But so that was our breakfast.

Margaret Faircloth (49:24): All that for breakfast?

David Hopper (49:26): But we played and Mama taught us school, and I don’t know what you girls did all the time, but we’d play outdoors. Barron and I had a fort.

Exploring and playing as children

Tim Hopper (49:40): You told us recently a story about finding bones. Can you tell about that?

David Hopper (49:44): Yeah, we had a fort that was an upside-down piano box at the top of a bank, and we had dug a tunnel to get into it. But we had kept various things in there. Remember having some human bones? You remember that?

Barron Hopper (49:59): In that fort? I don’t remember that fort.

David Hopper (50:02): You know the old pine tree just below the road, below the house, the gnarly pine tree that we’d sit up on?

Barron Hopper (50:10): Yeah.

David Hopper (50:11): Just below it, above the (interrupted). Whose garden was that? That was somebody else’s garden. There were some bones sticking out the bank there. We dug up parts of human skeletons and took it up there and had it in our fort. I did not. I’m sure we were very sacrilegious to the Koreans.

Barron Hopper (50:42): Well, they may not have known about

David Hopper (50:44): it.

Alice Dokter (50:45): Well, I remember the house that (interrupted). I can’t remember who it first (interrupted). The

Barron Hopper (50:51): [unclear] house. When they built it, you mean?

Alice Dokter (50:53): The one up the road from us, between us and the Cranes. On the left. When they were excavating for that, we kids would go and sit on the bank above it and watch them dig. And we named different ones of the people that were working on the site. I guess my mother must have been reading Treasure Island to us at the time, because when they dug up some human bones, which then slowed the project, they had to figure out what to do with them and regrave them and all like that.

But we went home that lunch, and we had named the people the Barbary Pirates. And so we would sit there and we would come home at lunch and tell about what they dug up today. Right.

David Hopper (51:50): Koreans buried people on the hillsides. They bury somebody and make a little mound of dirt over them. But this was post-years of war too. There have been various bodies just buried all over the place too. But (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (52:07): Aren’t they an old culture and they’ve been burying people for thousands of years?

David Hopper (52:14): Yeah, outside the city wall there on the hillsides.

Alice Dokter (52:18): Well, there was a grave up behind our house that you could see from Mama’s and Daddy’s room. You always knew it was a grave because here was this just rounded pile of dirt. And once or twice a year on different holidays, there would come the descendants of the buried person up there and offer a sacrifice, put out food and stuff like that for the spirits.

I think that that is why I still have sort of a repulsion to putting flowers on graves. I remember Granddaddy Longenecker was talking about going to put some flowers on Grandmother’s grave. When I was in college, I was washing the dishes, and I must have said something or made a noise or something. Yeah. Because I thought of that as tantamount to idolatry, and he was horrified that I would have such an idea. But I’m sure that it’s because of watching the person do the sacrifices to the big pile of dirt on the back of our hill.

David Hopper (53:34): Hmm. Barron, you remember we went over to watch the grave robbers?

Barron Hopper (53:41): Yeah, I remember that.

David Hopper (53:42): There would be these guys who would try and rob artifacts from old graves.

Barron Hopper (53:52): Well, the main thing was they would stick an iron rod into the ground and they would try to find porcelain or pottery jars that would have been left.

David Hopper (54:06): They could tell by the clunk. Yeah, when their iron rod (interrupted). They dig

Barron Hopper (54:11): them up,

David Hopper (54:11): hit it, and then they dig a hole down. And sometimes they bring up a broken one, or they’d broken it in the process, and they just toss it over the bank. And Barron and I would go back later and pick up the pieces to try and glue together.

Barron Hopper (54:26): But these weren’t necessarily old artifacts. They were (interrupted).

David Hopper (54:31): Some of them probably were.

Barron Hopper (54:32): Well, maybe so.

Alice Dokter (54:33): Well, and then there was the little robber. The little grave robber, didn’t we call him that?

David Hopper (54:39): Yeah.

Alice Dokter (54:40): The man that sold things, he would come around and try to get the missionaries to buy different things. Isn’t that where they got the Tiger Scroll?

David Hopper (54:48): I don’t know that, but some of them were extreme artifacts, little vases and wine cups out of clay and all that, probably were from a dynasty or two past, from 500 to 1,000 years old, some of them. And this guy would sit on the bottom steps out by the street by our house and try and sell these things.

Margaret Faircloth (55:19): Can I just jump in?

Tim Hopper (55:22): Sure. I was hoping we could uncover the mystery of what the young girls did all the time. We know what the boys did.

Margaret Faircloth (55:28): Well, I don’t know what Alice did. But when Mama was teaching them school, I was with our nanny, Pongsunie. She would take me around, whatever she was doing, and I would be with her, or I would be playing with other kids.

I was a postwar baby. After the Korean War, I think every family had a baby. And there’s a gap between me and David, so I’m a little bit younger than the other three and kind of grew up in a different cohort, different time. Right. So I remember Mama homeschooling all of them. To me, it was not pretty, and I was never going to homeschool. I just saw it as being a very frustrating activity for her and for them.

David Hopper (56:10): We made it.

Margaret Faircloth (56:13): But you made it. But unlike them, I had kids my own age. I think almost every family had a baby that year. And so there were a lot of us, and I had other kids to play with.

Now, I remember y’all always playing with the Korean kids. I didn’t do that so much because I had missionary children to play with. And looking back, one of my regrets is that I didn’t have more Korean friends, and I didn’t learn the Korean language as well as they did because I didn’t have the Korean friends. But I do remember your friends, and I remember being teased by them. My Korean name was Maguri, and they would call me Maguri Paguri, which means basket, and make me cry. So that’s what I remember about your friends.

Barron Hopper (57:02): David and I would call you Maguri Paguri also and make you mad. And we would call Alice, we would make up a name for her, Addishy Radishy, and get you upset and probably make you run to our parents.

David Hopper (57:23): Do you remember much about all those Korean boys that would come up to the yard and

Barron Hopper (57:28): play?

Margaret Faircloth (57:28): There were a lot of them.

Barron Hopper (57:29): You remember the gate man there had three or four boys, and it was Oogony, Tegony, Cheguny, and Hegony.

Alice Dokter (57:38): Really?

Margaret Faircloth (57:39): I remember that.

David Hopper (57:40): Yeah, I forgot that. I remember one of the boys had had his leg amputated. I don’t know what happened to him.

Barron Hopper (57:51): I don’t remember the leg.

David Hopper (57:52): He had crutches and he could outrun us with his crutches. He just vaulted himself along. And a lot of them had got one meal a day. They were hungry.

Barron Hopper (58:09): We would play their games, some of their games, and one of them was motamoki, and you played it with nails.

David Hopper (58:16): I couldn’t remember what that was called. I was trying to think.

Barron Hopper (58:19): Well, you would hold the nail with the point up between your finger and your thumb, and you would throw it down into the dirt, and it had to stand up. It was kind of like marbles used to be played in America, where you would take the other person’s marbles. You would win their marbles. And this damoki meant we’re going to pick them off, we’re going to take them from the other person. So you try to win all the nails.

David Hopper (58:49): You won it by kind of pinning on top of, your nail pinned on top of their nail.

Barron Hopper (58:56): Or knock their nail over. Anyhow, it was something that they had invented back then. It was a little paper thing. But kids do that.

David Hopper (59:03): And the other, pachugi.

Alice Dokter (59:06): Yeah.

Barron Hopper (59:06): Yeah.

David Hopper (59:07): Which was folded up pieces of paper into little squares.

Barron Hopper (59:11): Yeah.

David Hopper (59:12): That we’d throw down and flip the other person’s over, and you’d win there.

Barron Hopper (59:19): We had an advantage because we had used magazines and stuff like that to make pachugi. We had unlimited supply.

David Hopper (59:27): And we had, paper wasn’t available for them, nails sometimes that we could pull from old

Barron Hopper (59:32): Yeah. Cartons. So we were well supplied with ammunition, so.

Alice Dokter (59:36): Girls used to play a game that would be similar to jump rope, except we didn’t jump the rope. It was a thin, and I meant to bring some because I have some at home, but it was a thin black, about a little bit narrower than these cords here, of black rubber. You would tie it around two girls’ legs, one on each side. And then there was an intricate dance that kids would do, girls would do, twisting their legs back and forth and jumping up and down across the cord.

There would be various chants, I guess similar to what little girls did with jump ropes. It was very intricate what you would do. And then there was another game.

David Hopper (1:00:39): Wasn’t that [unclear]?

Alice Dokter (1:00:43): Yeah.

David Hopper (1:00:44): [Singing in Korean; words unclear.]

Alice Dokter (1:00:50): [Singing in Korean; words unclear.] The song was about (interrupted).

David Hopper (1:01:04): I haven’t sung that for 70 years, 65 years.

Alice Dokter (1:01:09): That’s a song about little birds that build outside your house. But that was one of the songs. It was amazing to watch the girls jump. And remember, they’re wearing these rubber shoes that easily fall off, but they never fell off. They would just jump over the (interrupted), and be very precise. And I wish I had learned them well enough to be able to do them.

Barron Hopper (1:01:39): We would learn various tunes, though. One was a tune that was sung or played or something. And there was an archery range in the valley in front of our house. It’s the only one I ever remember seeing in Korea. Yeah. But the archery target must have been about 10 feet tall and about six feet wide. These little old men would stand in a little pavilion at one end of a long field, and at the other end would have the target. And the little old men would have beards and all, and they would fire their arrows down toward that.

David Hopper (1:02:20): Over 100 meters.

Barron Hopper (1:02:21): Yeah, it was a long way.

Margaret Faircloth (1:02:23): These were the old-timey bows and arrows.

David Hopper (1:02:26): And that archery range is still there.

Margaret Faircloth (1:02:29): Is it?

David Hopper (1:02:29): It’s a national treasure, actually, I think. And it’s a great sport for them.

Alice Dokter (1:02:37): Well, they couldn’t see where the arrow hit. It was so far. Maybe it was 150 yards. They couldn’t see where the arrow hit, and so there would be a little boy down there with flags, as I recall.

David Hopper (1:02:49): Fans. A little fan that he would show where it hit. Who won? And there were several of those little boys got nailed over the years, and fortunately it was about 200 yards up, down below the hospital, and they got zipped up to the hospital.

Alice Dokter (1:03:09): I wondered about that.

David Hopper (1:03:10): Yeah.

Barron Hopper (1:03:12): Anyhow, these bows were made out of bone, I think.

Margaret Faircloth (1:03:17): Really?

Barron Hopper (1:03:17): Really? I think I’m right on that, or [unclear].

David Hopper (1:03:21): They were totally recurved. When they were unstrung, they were backwards loop, and they would string them all the way up to here. The pull on them was like a 100-pound pull or something that took great strength to be able to pull them.

Barron Hopper (1:03:40): Some of them had beards and they had to be careful not to get that tangled.

Alice Dokter (1:03:43): Daddy had a picture of one man with a beard that he split it and put one over one side of his ear and one over the other side of his ear so it wouldn’t get tangled in the bowstring.

David Hopper (1:03:57): When I was in Chonju last, which would have been about eight years ago or something, I was in Seoul, took a bus down to Chonju for the day, and it was kind of depressing because I didn’t know anybody. But I wandered down to the archery range, and I sat there and watched archery and talked to the old men, and they gave me food to eat. Hmm. It was interesting. Yeah, it’s still there.

Alice Dokter (1:04:31): I didn’t know that.

Barron Hopper (1:04:33): Kind of like a bowling alley.

David Hopper (1:04:34): I mean, it’s there with, you know, over to the side are 15-story apartment buildings and things.

Barron Hopper (1:04:44): This is the song that they would sing at their big tournaments. [Singing in Korean; words unclear.]

Alice Dokter (1:04:55): Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Barron Hopper (1:04:58): And it went on further. So there are various songs that we knew. We knew the chants from when they would bring a funeral bier by. And (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (1:05:09): Funerals were exciting. They would go through the pass that was down where the caves were that we spoke about earlier. The non-Christian funerals were very colorful, and there were paper flowers of all colors all over the casket. They would carry the casket on, much like we think about the Ark of the Covenant being carried, on poles on people’s shoulders.

They wore what was known as sackcloth. Sackcloth, which was a burlap type of material that was sort of a yellowish-brownish color. The men would have these tall hats that looked like upside-down paper bags, and the women would wear braided straw rope in their hair. And everybody would wail and yell and cry. Of course, at the non-Christian funerals, they would be drunk, and some of them would be doing outlandish stuff, which was just wonderful for us to watch.

So we would go and, “Oh, there’s a funeral.” Maybe that’s why I go to funerals. But we would go and watch them. Now, a Christian funeral was not as interesting because it was white. Everybody wore white, and they sang hymns. They didn’t get drunk and act silly, so they weren’t near as interesting.

Barron Hopper (1:06:52): And we called the men who wore the big sackcloth things on here, we called them sad sacks.

Margaret Faircloth (1:06:59): I think they would hire professional mourners, didn’t they?

Alice Dokter (1:07:03): Yes.

Homeschooling and Christmas memories

Tim Hopper (1:07:04): So we heard Aunt Margaret’s perspective on the homeschooling for the three older ones, but what was that like? And I guess, how old would you be when you went off to KCA? Sixth grade? Seventh grade?

Barron Hopper (1:07:16): Seventh grade.

Tim Hopper (1:07:17): Seventh grade. So what were those elementary school years like with (interrupted)?

Barron Hopper (1:07:21): It was boring for me.

Tim Hopper (1:07:22): I guess they’d bring in curriculum from the U.S. of some kind?

Margaret Faircloth (1:07:27): Calvert.

Alice Dokter (1:07:29): We would get boxes in the fall and it was very (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (1:07:33): In the mail?

Alice Dokter (1:07:34): In the mail. They were from the Calvert Course, Tuscany Road in Baltimore, Maryland. And they had everything in them, from the pencils and the erasers to put on the pencils, to a new ruler and a new box of crayons, the paper that you wrote on, and the books for that year.

Barron Hopper (1:07:56): Textbooks and workbooks, and how much to use.

Alice Dokter (1:07:58): And the curriculum, which was a manual that gave the daily lessons and so forth. There were times when Mama would, because I was the oldest, Mama would set the manual down in front of me and say, “Do what it says here, and then I’ll go work with the boys.” And she’d work with Barron and David.

Barron Hopper (1:08:20): I just remember being bored and sitting at a little wooden table, looking out one of the side windows of our house, and just watching the orioles play in the trees and just, “This will never end.” That’s what I remember.

David Hopper (1:08:37): I remember sixth grade when Barron had gone off to boarding school and we had school in the old Linton house down below us with Mama. Mama was teaching me and John Seel, and John Seel was in third grade and I was in sixth grade, and I persecuted him mercilessly.

Margaret Faircloth (1:09:07): Was that the year of the Christmas trees? Because I remember being down in that house when that happened.

David Hopper (1:09:16): No, the Christmas trees I think came the next year when I was in Taejon. [Unclear.]

Margaret Faircloth (1:09:24): We must have still been in school in the same house.

Alice Dokter (1:09:27): I was so mad about that.

Margaret Faircloth (1:09:29): Because you weren’t there?

Alice Dokter (1:09:30): Because I wasn’t there.

Tim Hopper (1:09:32): Can somebody tell what happened?

Margaret Faircloth (1:09:33): I guess I was the only one who was there, and I was down in the Linton house in school. That Christmas, the Koreans had made a law that you couldn’t chop down trees. Previously, Daddy would always take us out in the woods, and we’d find a pine tree and take it home for a Christmas tree. It wasn’t a Korean tradition at that time. So we would do that.

But David had talked previously about the trees on the missionary compound. Most of the country was just denuded of trees, I think from the wartime. There just were not tall trees anywhere. And so they made a law that you couldn’t cut down trees, and so we weren’t going to be able to have a Christmas tree that year. Right. And we were all very disappointed, no Christmas tree.

So it was, I don’t know, a week or two before Christmas, and I was in school. Frankie Keller came running down. He was younger, wasn’t in school yet, and said, “There are Christmas trees falling in the Cranes’ yard.” And so we all jumped up and ran up the hill to the Cranes’ house. The Cranes and Kellers shared a yard. There were two houses close to each other with a large yard there. And there was a military plane that was circling over the compound, and every time they would come around, they would push a Christmas tree out of their hatch, and they were bouncing in the yard.

That’s just what I remembered. I just have this mental picture of these trees just bouncing all over the Cranes’ yard. And the backstory was that we frequently made friends with the military guys. There was an airbase and a missile base on either side of us. Some of the guys from the airbase had been flying over to Japan for something, taking cargo to Japan, and were going to be flying back with an empty plane. Right. And so they filled it up with Christmas trees and brought them over. I don’t remember the exact story, but I think they were low on fuel or something and couldn’t land. And so they just circled the compound and pushed out these trees and went back to their base and landed.

David Hopper (1:11:54): It was a helicopter, wasn’t it?

Alice Dokter (1:11:56): We actually (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (1:11:57): I don’t remember.

Alice Dokter (1:11:58): It was a helicopter. We actually learned this story because that would have been my last Christmas in Korea, before graduating and going to college. One of the men that stayed with us that Christmas was a man whose job it was to test flares at the airport in Kunsan. Mm-hmm.

The Kunsan Air Force Base was a large base, and there wasn’t communication. He had been trying to get communication, but there wasn’t yet a walkie-talkie down for him to use that he could keep in touch with the tower. Mary Seel had gone to the airbase at some point, and she had made known the fact that there were eight families in Chonju that would not have a Christmas tree this year because of this new ruling. And so when the men (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (1:13:07): Park Chung-hee.

Alice Dokter (1:13:08): I’m sorry?

Barron Hopper (1:13:09): The president was Park Chung-hee, and he was in control of everything.

Alice Dokter (1:13:13): When they shut down the cutting of trees. So these men, when they were at the Air Force base in Japan, they saw some Christmas trees or something, and they had an empty bomb bay on the plane that they were flying into Kunsan. So they stacked them in the bomb bay.

Out over the Sea of Japan, one of the lights indicating something was pressing on the hydraulic system started flashing, which meant they were supposed to empty whatever was in the bomb bay, empty it into the Pacific. But they knew that their cargo was Christmas trees, so they did not want to empty that into the (interrupted). So they alerted Kunsan that they were coming in on an emergency basis to prepare the base for them coming in.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the airstrip, the man that was in our home for Christmas was getting ready to test flares. And a flare meant, “Do not land, there’s something going on on the ground.” Well, he didn’t know what was going on with the tower, having this emergency plane coming in. And so they had foamed the runway and had emergency vehicles on standby, but he shot off a flare, which meant circle around and then come in again.

The tower was just livid because he had broken their protocol, but there was nothing for the pilot to do but circle around and then come in. So they landed amidst foam and everything like that, because they didn’t know what their landing gear would do.

So then there was a problem of how to get the trees over to the children in the mission station. They learned that there was a helicopter that was flying supplies down to Taegu, to an orphanage down there. They were flying gifts down to orphans. So, well, could they put the trees in and just take them back to Jeonju on the way coming back? Oh, sure, fine. So they did that, but it turned out they were running low on fuel, and so they couldn’t land and then get up again. They had to just circle around and assume somebody would see them and drop them.

Barron Hopper (1:16:06): We had lots of relationships with the military, and they were helpful. Our parents were allowed to use the PX, and we could get groceries there that we couldn’t get, American-type food. We got that there.

My father and other missionaries would go to a little missile site that had about 150 men there, and one of the missionaries or another would go there and have a worship service on Sunday morning. So we would go with my father when he would do it, and we’d meet the young soldiers and all. And then one time some of them were going to throw away a bunch of out-of-date meat.

David Hopper (1:16:50): They had an inspection coming up and needed to clear their freezers before the inspection.

Barron Hopper (1:16:54): So they loaded up a little Jeep trailer pretty much full and covered it up and drove over to Chonju, and they brought it to our house. And so a station call went out to all the missionaries, you know, “Come and get it.” It was all this meat that was out of date, but we’d just all put it in our freezers and ate it. I mean, you know how (interrupted).

David Hopper (1:17:14): It was steaks and roaster chickens. Good meat. And so we had all kinds of meat. Yeah.

Barron Hopper (1:17:21): Relationships. My father would put them in touch with an orphanage. It was a leprosarium, and there was an orphanage. Well, the kids had to be taken away from their parents so they wouldn’t get the disease.

I remember going out there to take the food, or to take the GIs there with their load of food to the orphanage. I’m sure that was meaningful to them. And I remember my father afterwards, “Oh, you know what the Koreans are going to do with all that good bacon? They’re going to make soup out of it.” We couldn’t get bacon over there, so my father was just killed by that.

David Hopper (1:18:03): Let me tell two quick military-related things while we’re talking about our relationship with the military. One was, occasionally guys would fly a helicopter over, land on the boys’ school playground at the bottom of the hill and (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (1:18:25): Disrupt activity.

David Hopper (1:18:27): And come up to the station. But as soon as we heard a helicopter, so much for school, we would zoom down to there.

Barron Hopper (1:18:37): Right.

David Hopper (1:18:38): And one time, I don’t know if it was just you and me,

Alice Dokter (1:18:41): No, I did too.

David Hopper (1:18:41): Were you, when we went up in the helicopter? Yeah, we ran down there.

Barron Hopper (1:18:45): We rode one time.

David Hopper (1:18:46): One time. And these guys said, “Would y’all like a ride?”

Alice Dokter (1:18:51): No parental permission, just (interrupted).

David Hopper (1:18:55): You know, no U.S. government permission, no parental permission. We climbed on board this old helicopter, and they took us up and circled us over the station. If I remember right, the door was open with one of those rope things across it, and we could wave, we could see down to Mama and [name unclear] in the front yard. And that was our first helicopter ride, only helicopter ride for me, but that was cool.

Alice Dokter (1:19:26): It was noisy.

David Hopper (1:19:28): And nobody would allow that these days, but (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (1:19:32): Well, Daddy apparently was in his office typing something. And he said, “Well, there goes the helicopter overhead. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kids aren’t on board.”

David Hopper (1:19:42): I didn’t know. And the other thing, the guys came over from the airbase one time. A group of guys came over, had supper with us, and I don’t know if they brought hot dogs or anything, but anyway, somebody asked one of them if they’d say the blessing. And he said, “God bless us in this godforsaken place.”

Margaret Faircloth (1:20:06): Were y’all there when the military guys brought their helicopter up Chidi?

David Hopper (1:20:13): Yeah. No.

Margaret Faircloth (1:20:14): You were there?

Barron Hopper (1:20:16): I was there.

Margaret Faircloth (1:20:17): One summer, there were some guys who were friends with, I don’t know, maybe the Landrys?

Barron Hopper (1:20:25): Probably somebody from Kwangju, wasn’t

Margaret Faircloth (1:20:26): it? They were from Kwangju. I don’t know who they were friends with, but anyway, we were all up Chidi, our vacation place in the mountains, and they flew their helicopter up there and landed on the tennis court and stayed overnight one time. They did it a couple of times, I think.

Barron Hopper (1:20:48): I just remember that the helicopter went straight away from our Chidi to go to Kwangju. It just went, yeah, like that.

David Hopper (1:20:56): I had forgotten all about that. Really? Thank you.

Transcript: Part 2, Medical Care, Mission Work, and Summers on Jirisan

Medical care

David Hopper (00:00): The medical situations in Korea for us as a family, I think, are something that we ought to touch base on. We probably had as good of care as you could most anywhere in the world because we were there (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (00:16): Oh, yeah.

David Hopper (00:17): On a mission station with doctors around us, always one, two, three or four American doctors, and then some Korean doctors at the hospital, who were our neighbors. So if we had problems, we always had medical help.

Alice Dokter (00:38): We went to an uncle or an aunt.

Margaret Faircloth (00:40): Exactly.

David Hopper (00:41): We called everybody uncle or aunt. But I remember I got stitches half a dozen times or something. I remember Mama one time saying, now the hospital was a couple hundred yards down the hill from us, Mama saying to me, ‘Oh, go on down there and ask Uncle Frank to sew you up.’ She swore later on she never sent me by myself, but yes, she did.

Margaret Faircloth (01:12): I can remember just going straight to Uncle Frank’s house. If it was late afternoon, he’d be home for dinner or something. Don’t even bother going home, just hop straight over there.

David Hopper (01:24): But he was in his office, and I walked in with a gash that was bleeding, and he took care of me.

Barron Hopper (01:31): I didn’t remember ever going independently, or particularly any way, to the hospital other than (interrupted).

David Hopper (01:41): I think Mama was fed up with me at that point.

Alice Dokter (01:43): Well, David, you were prone to accidents even when you were a toddler in Quitman. She was so embarrassed because she had to take you to the pediatrician to get your stomach pumped because you drank shoe polish. Then you tried to eat Dutch Cleanser. Then she had put Clorox into a measuring cup and poured it in the washing machine, and you took the measuring cup and drank the Clorox. And she was just (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (02:26): Explains the white hair. Well, on the other hand, some people would have been calmer and wouldn’t have necessarily taken a child for some of the events to the doctor. Mama was up and ready to (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (02:42): I wonder if part of it was that we were used to it being so readily available. That’s just (interrupted).

David Hopper (02:46): I was having a bad nosebleed, and I remember Paul Crane met me at the bottom of the front steps that went down by Daddy’s garage there. I was down by the road there. Uncle Paul came and he pinched my nose and held it for about five minutes, and he pinched hard. But it stopped the bleeding, and I’ve always known how to stop a nosebleed since. But yeah, we were talking earlier about the shots we got.

Alice Dokter (03:18): The picnic for the shots.

Tim Hopper (03:23): Can you tell the story you just told on our little break, Uncle Barron, about the shots?

Barron Hopper (03:28): Well, I just remember that by the time I was eight or nine years old, I had figured out what the picnic was about. So one time we were going to have this, it was a potluck and (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (03:43): Station picnic.

Barron Hopper (03:44): I decided that I was going to avoid it this time, and what I did was I locked myself in the bathroom. But somehow they got me out and I had to get my shots anyhow.

David Hopper (03:58): But I think that they must have, they’d get shots, immunizations in from the States or something, and they must have just given us whatever they had. I think we got tetanus shots every year and typhoid.

Barron Hopper (04:14): Smallpox and cholera.

David Hopper (04:17): And polio. And [unclear] frequency of shots back then, but our tetanus shots certainly were not ten years apart. They were annually. We have got to be immune to (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (04:28): Well, the thing about shots back then, they didn’t have any [unclear]. Nowadays you have these fine little needles and you don’t even feel them, but back then they had these big horse needles or something, and they would sterilize the whole little contraption of the needle.

David Hopper (04:48): Needles were reused.

Barron Hopper (04:51): And they were dull as could be, and they would jab you in the arm. They talk about getting jabbed for COVID and stuff. Well, they don’t know what jabbed is like.

Alice Dokter (05:02): They sure don’t. When I was at KCA, I remember one day there were these black cars that drove up, and these military people got out, and they went in to talk to the principal, Mr. Groeschel. When he came out, his face was very serious, and he said, ‘You kids have to call your parents and explain something to us.’ He came into the study hall and told us that all of us had been exposed to rabies because the little puppy that they had had, who had bitten no one, the rabies people at the missile base said that you could get rabies if you breathed the air the dog breathed.

So we all had to get, anybody that had been in the school, and that included babies, that included everybody in the school. We children had to go to the missile base, yes, for two weeks and get shots in our stomachs. One, two, three, four, five. Well, the men at the missile base felt sorry for these busloads of kids, well, Land Rover loads of kids that would come in. I don’t know if the parents didn’t have to or not. That doesn’t make sense to me now. But anyway, they took up a collection to buy us candy bars and Cokes, so you could get both a candy bar and a Coke on the same day at the same time every day for two weeks.

We later read on the back page of the Stars and Stripes newspaper that this use of rabies vaccine had used up all of Korea and Japan’s supply of vaccine. I don’t know if that was true, but we had 13 shots instead of the prescribed 14. But we had them in our stomachs, and that was, like you said, they boiled the needles. So you would come out and say, ‘Well, did you get a sharp one or a square one?’ ‘No, I got one that must have been bent,’ because the kids, the babies, would tense up their muscles and they would bend those suckers as they tried to pull the needles out. So that was not a pleasant time, except every day we got a Coca-Cola and a candy bar, which was unusual.

David Hopper (08:01): But we also had dental care. We had to go to Kwangju, a station 70 miles to the south of us, to the dentist. The old dentist back in the ’50s and ’60s, I guess, Dr. Levi. Levi. Levi.

Barron Hopper (08:22): He had been Daddy’s dentist when Daddy was growing up too, I think.

David Hopper (08:27): Okay, well, he had old, old machinery. Maybe it was, I don’t know if it was a pedal-driven, pump-driven, pedal-driven drill.

Alice Dokter (08:40): It wasn’t fast.

Barron Hopper (08:41): It was electrical, I’m pretty sure.

David Hopper (08:42): It was electric, but it went (interrupted). I still hate that. Yeah.

Barron Hopper (08:47): I think they had the same thing in America a lot too, probably.

Margaret Faircloth (08:50): Well, it still sounds like that.

David Hopper (08:52): But he was our dentist and took good care of us.

Alice Dokter (08:56): Yep.

David Hopper (08:57): And then Dr. Nussbaum later on.

Alice Dokter (09:00): Those fillings lasted.

Margaret Faircloth (09:02): Yeah, I still have mine. Our teeth were terrible, at least mine was, maybe partly because we didn’t have fluorinated water.

David Hopper (09:11): Didn’t have fluorinated water.

Alice Dokter (09:14): We didn’t have good toothpaste either.

Barron Hopper (09:16): It was probably more of the chlorinated, lack of chlorinated water.

David Hopper (09:21): Yeah.

Tim Hopper (09:21): And all those Cokes and candy bars Aunt Alice had.

David Hopper (09:24): Because we could only drink boiled water, which they kept a big jug of boiled water in the kitchen. I learned later on that some of y’all never rinsed your mouth out. You’d brush your teeth and spit, but never rinse out, because to rinse out you had to go down to the kitchen and get some water.

Margaret Faircloth (09:52): My husband was shocked when we got married and I didn’t rinse my mouth.

Alice Dokter (09:56): I never thought about that. I still don’t.

Joe and Dot’s mission work

Tim Hopper (09:58): One person we haven’t talked a whole lot about is your father, who was the missionary. Can you share what your awareness was of his work? I know at least towards the end of his time, he traveled a lot. Was he traveling a lot when you were young as well, or was his work more around the Chonju area?

Barron Hopper (10:18): Well, the big travel, of course, was while we were in America and he was in Korea during the war. So he was just gone from us for, I don’t know what, a couple of years or a year and a half or something. Year and a half. Then after that, in Korea, he traveled a lot, yeah.

David Hopper (10:33): Daddy would always go out on these trips to the country, and he would take his bags of stuff and his shotgun in the winter.

Alice Dokter (10:47): And he would always take packets of grape Kool-Aid. Daddy was the only one in the family that had Kool-Aid, and he kept it in his study

David Hopper (11:00): up in the bookcase,

Alice Dokter (11:03): up towards the back wall. It was grape Kool-Aid because that’s what he took to the country with boiled water to use to make communion. So rare was the time that we got Kool-Aid, but if we got Kool-Aid, grape. We had to get special permission to get the only Kool-Aid that there was out of Daddy’s study. So he always took boiled water and Kool-Aid with him to make communion in the (interrupted).

David Hopper (11:38): I remember going in his study and sniffing the little packets. I think that Kool-Aid probably didn’t have any flavor to it by the time it got to the communion, because we had sniffed all the flavor out of it.

But Daddy was usually the supervisor of 20 to 40 churches around the province. A province is like a state. Depending on the direction, he would go and stay out several days and visit numerous churches. That was because these churches that were assigned to him by the presbytery were the ones that did not have an ordained pastor. They had an

Margaret Faircloth (12:29): evangelist,

David Hopper (12:29): lay evangelist or Bible school graduate or somebody there, and he had to do the sacraments. So he would interview people for joining the church and do what he called the catechumen examinations and baptisms and building up and encouraging of the pastors. But he would be gone a lot.

Margaret Faircloth (13:08): Four to five days a week.

David Hopper (13:10): And he would always be with his Korean assistant that he would go out.

Barron Hopper (13:16): I remember the missionaries got to be quite well known. We were way out in Namwon County hunting one afternoon. We would sometimes hunt with my father. That was one of our recreations. David and my father and I were going over a hill, and there were some women up there raking pine needles to burn in their fire. I heard one of the Korean women say, ‘Cho Moksa, Cho Moksa,’ and that was our father. We were nowhere, and this woman recognized my father.

Now, one thing was that when my father came back to America after the war, I was heard telling David, instructing David in the things of life. I said, ‘Mama is the boy boss of we, but Daddy is the boss of she.’ That was a saying that came in our family. I think it must have been that after my father had been gone a year and a half or two years and I was three and a half or four years old, I didn’t quite know who this person was or how they fitted in. Right. I kind of figured it out, and I told David how life worked.

David Hopper (14:35): Thank you. I’ve been wondering. But Daddy had a study in the house always. A couple things about him I remember. One, he was an excellent typist. He would crank out letters to America. He would type out sermons, and he would pound away at his typewriter. When IBM came out with Selectric typewriters, he bought a Selectric and wore it out.

But part of his wonderful letter writing and good communication with the churches was that they helped. Supporting churches in the U.S. supported him well. Now, they were paid a salary by the mission, and that was a set amount, but they had a special asking list of projects that they wanted to be able to fund, and that’s what they would raise support for. Many missionaries struggled with supporting some ideas and projects that they had, and Daddy never had great difficulty with that because he always communicated with these people. He had some very high-up wealthy people that helped support him at times that he had met and kept track with. He would be in a heyday with emailing stuff now. Mm-hmm.

So he was a man of many talents and was always working on something. He had helped build churches, probably helped start up a couple hundred churches maybe. He would have all these people come up to the house to see chumoksanim, to get help, advice for various things.

Alice Dokter (16:52): He was called the Bishop of North Chulla.

David Hopper (16:58): By missionaries.

Alice Dokter (17:00): By the missionaries, because he functioned like a bishop with underlings under him. Not that they were under him, but that they would seek his advice for stuff.

David Hopper (17:13): And he would shuffle them a little bit, advise them where to go to start a church. He had a map on his wall of Korea, of the town, of the province. Of the province. He put pins in it, and he and Hugh Linton, who was in Soonchun, their goal was to get Operation (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (17:41): Lighthouse.

David Hopper (17:41): A church within walking distance of every Korean in the area, which was about five miles. Every village, maybe about five miles, an hour, hour and a half walk.

Margaret Faircloth (17:52): And they did it.

David Hopper (17:56): And they did it.

Margaret Faircloth (17:57): I was back in Korea in 1985, and at that time the roads were paved, so we were moving much more quickly through the province when we were traveling around. I wish I’d had a tape recorder because every valley, every village that we passed, Daddy had a story about it and how it was started.

David Hopper (18:19): And he kept amazing records. I have names of all these churches on a list that I don’t have a clue where they are, but he was involved with them.

Barron Hopper (18:30): I remember 1976, ‘77, Martha and I went to Korea for a year, and Mom and Daddy would take us out to their churches in the country and stuff. I remember one church we went to, and then we were heading home in the Land Rover, or maybe it was a

Margaret Faircloth (18:48): Pinto.

Barron Hopper (18:49): Pinto by then. My father went into the home of a deacon or something who was sick, and all the Korean children gathered around us like they usually would out far out in the country.

My mother would always like to have something to give to everybody, and she didn’t have anything to give them, so she gave them my father’s hymn book. My father was furious, if you can say he would get furious, because they had three or four hymn books in Korea, and he had the numbers of all the different hymns in all the hymn books written on the hymn book. That’s terrific. The pages of all the hymns, and he was so upset that she had given away his hymn book.

Margaret Faircloth (19:32): But to your original question, I think we always knew what he did. I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of what he did.

David Hopper (19:40): It was not until I went back after college or in med school that I went out to the country with him, though, and saw him in action, so to speak. But there was a leprosy colony church just outside of town that Daddy had helped from the start of it.

Alice Dokter (20:06): And he would go every Christmas.

Barron Hopper (20:08): During the Korean War.

David Hopper (20:10): From before the Korean War and through the war and all. He was their man at that church, and they loved him dearly. He preached there every Christmas, wasn’t it? Mm-hmm.

Barron Hopper (20:21): They would give us eggs and apples. And it was cold in there.

Margaret Faircloth (20:24): It was cold.

David Hopper (20:25): And it was unheated, bitterly cold. These people who didn’t have their fingers and toes and noses, all been destroyed by leprosy, and gruesome-looking people, but (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (20:42): Joyful.

David Hopper (20:42): They were happy and sung out loud, and they loved Daddy, and they would shake our (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (20:49): Sometimes they’d drop at our house.

David Hopper (20:50): They would shake our hands and things.

Alice Dokter (20:53): We were taught as kids to be hospitable. If somebody came and wanted to see Daddy, usually he would be in his office doing something. But if he was busy or if he was at his office over the printing press, then we were taught to give the people a magazine to look at, get them a glass of water and seat them on the porch. Especially if they were lepers, they didn’t come in the house. But other people may have come in the house, although in good weather they usually sat on, we had swings at two ends of the porch, and so they would sit out there. But we were taught very early to welcome guests and to seat them and give them a magazine to look at.

David Hopper (21:52): Yeah, one of Daddy’s other jobs was he was in charge of the mission press. He had an editor under him, but he was founder of the Pok Twen Malsum, the blessing (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (22:11): Blessed Word.

David Hopper (22:13): Blessed Word magazine that was the only pastors’ magazine in Korea that he edited. He and a Korean man working with him edited, and they printed it at his press. Daddy was in charge of the mission press. We used to go down and watch them making type. It used lead type. It was all hand-set printing, and we’d stand there as they have the molten lead going through the thingy making the type. I’ve thought about how much lead fumes we might have inhaled with (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (23:05): Well, we’d take some of the lead and play with it.

David Hopper (23:07): Play with it all the time, yeah.

Barron Hopper (23:09): Yeah. So if our brains are a little deranged, you have an idea.

Tim Hopper (23:16): How did Grandmom handle Granddaddy being gone so much? I remember her mostly in her, it’s really ’80s and ’90s, and she worried about her grandchildren a lot, and worried about a lot of things a lot. Was that challenging for her?

Barron Hopper (23:33): Well, she lived with us and, well, there was a couple that worked for us. The woman was the nanny and she washed the laundry. Her husband did our gardening, and he would sleep in our house when my father was out in the country.

David Hopper (23:46): I forgot that.

Alice Dokter (23:47): I didn’t remember that either.

Barron Hopper (23:48): Yeah.

David Hopper (23:49): I think you’re right.

Barron Hopper (23:49): Yeah. So that would reassure her.

Alice Dokter (23:53): But when Daddy was home, we would play games at night. When Mama was home, we usually were read to. She read us a lot of different books. All of us had measles. Well, the three older children had measles at the same time because we got it from Margaret. Margaret had measles.

Margaret Faircloth (24:16): Mama told me I hadn’t had measles.

Alice Dokter (24:18): She’s wrong because you had measles and you had blonde hair, and they even got in, you had really blonde hair, and you could see your measles all through the scalp. But you had already had them when we all three came down with them. In those days, it was thought that you needed to keep people, for whatever reason, in a dark room. Dark room. So the three of us would sit in Mama’s and Daddy’s bed, and the shades were drawn and everything, and Mama would read to us. She read us, I remember this story, Penrod. She read us Penrod and Freckles.

David Hopper (25:07): I remember Freckles.

Alice Dokter (25:09): Let’s see, what was the other one? I can’t remember.

Margaret Faircloth (25:14): And she read some big classics. I remember her reading David Copperfield. Yeah. I mean, that’s (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (25:19): Yeah, she read really well.

David Hopper (25:25): And she would sing her ditties.

Margaret Faircloth (25:27): Yes.

Alice Dokter (25:28): Yes.

Margaret Faircloth (25:28): For being sort of a nervous woman, I think she was actually a very strong woman, and she kind of coped with things even when they made her nervous.

David Hopper (25:39): And she always self-deprecated her work, compared herself to people who were healthcare professionals or professors or something. But she raised four kids, kept the home place so Daddy could be out in the country and working night and day with church planting work.

Alice Dokter (26:13): She did canning and (interrupted).

David Hopper (26:15): Yeah, but she would go visit the orphanage every week. She would go visit women in prison every week. She would go to the hospital and go around and pray with women in their beds at the hospital and minister to them. She was a real servant with that kind of stuff.

Margaret Faircloth (26:39): And then later, when I went to boarding school, she and Daddy traveled together to the country. They had a little trailer, and she would teach Sunday school and teach the women, [unclear]. I am sure there are lots of country women and children in heaven because of her.

David Hopper (26:57): No question.

Alice Dokter (26:59): Well, she also at one point taught people English. Different young, I guess, seminary students or something, she would teach them English.

David Hopper (27:14): And some people that learned English both from Grandmother Hopper and from Mama went on to successful climbing the ladder in the country because they had learned English, which put them ahead in life.

Barron Hopper (27:28): I remember seeing a picture one time of three young men that she had taught or was teaching English to. You remember the big cotton mill or whatever it was in Kwangju? Well, guess who was the head of that one? It was one of the young men that Grandma had taught, and the other two were big businessmen.

Alice Dokter (27:47): Yeah.

Barron Hopper (27:49): Or politicians.

David Hopper (27:50): The head of security for the president was a student of Grandma Hopper’s.

Barron Hopper (27:58): Right.

David Hopper (27:59): But Mama really did a huge amount of stuff. She loved to write. She wrote these little ditties, ‘Thoughts of the Times,’ for the English-speaking Korea newspaper, the Korea Times.

Margaret Faircloth (28:18): She also, I think, was a real encourager of the missionaries, particularly the missionary women. I’ve had various people talk about going to Mom, going over to our house, and she would sit them in a chair and put a blanket over their knees and bring them something to drink, and just listen and talk to them. Because we were near the medical center there, sometimes people would come and stay for a while for health reasons. Particularly women expecting babies may come and stay for several weeks while they waited.

Alice Dokter (28:49): They had to be there a month early.

Margaret Faircloth (28:51): And she would just love on these people and take care of them.

David Hopper (28:57): Her prayer partner was Ruth Foltz for many years. They were very close.

Summers on Chidi San

Tim Hopper (29:04): Her son has shared with me his memories of how close they were and what an encouragement Grandmom was to his mother. One place that’s been alluded to that was very important in your lives in Korea was Chidi San. We should talk more about that and what that experience was like. I guess maybe as a start there, somebody could just explain what Chidi San was and where it was. Uncle Barron?

Barron Hopper (29:32): Well, Chidi San was a mountain in a range. It was a mountain range, and the missionaries, probably back in the 1920s, one of them was Grandfather Joseph Hopper, but several missionaries went out, scouted out an area and set up an area for the missionaries to set up summer vacation spots. Probably they started with tents.

David Hopper (29:59): Let me just throw out that it wasn’t just vacations, getting to a higher, safe elevation because there was lots of death from malaria and other, typhoid and other diseases. So the missionaries went to the mountains.

Barron Hopper (30:17): So they set up this one pretty place and they built, I don’t know how many cottages were up there, little (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (30:24): And a hotel.

Barron Hopper (30:24): Well, there was a little hotel.

David Hopper (30:26): Twenty or thirty, I think.

Barron Hopper (30:28): Thirty. Well, anyhow, it was in a large valley on top of a mountain.

Tim Hopper (30:34): Was it all Southern Presbyterians or other groups as well up there?

Barron Hopper (30:37): I think it was primarily Presbyterians. We were the main people in that part of the country anyhow, main missionaries. So when we came back after the Korean War, at least, all of the cottages had been destroyed and the hotel had been destroyed. The communist guerrillas during the Korean War had occupied that area.

So we went back up there for several years, but I guess it was because Korean students started considering that a neat place to hike through. Yeah. They would come through, and we were living in tents on these sites where the houses had been. We moved to a different mountain, and then the mission, about maybe ten, five or ten houses up there.

David Hopper (31:32): Eleven ultimately, seven or eleven.

Barron Hopper (31:35): You had to walk to get up there. You had to walk about five miles up a mountain.

Margaret Faircloth (31:40): It was a grueling hike.

Barron Hopper (31:42): Yeah, it really was. But we would spend three or four weeks up there and be with people that we knew, and it was a special time. We would enjoy playing with people like the Linton boys or the Robinsons, and the adults would have a lot of recreation like cards and stuff. They’d play cards in the evening.

Later, over what we call the new Chidi, or the second place, the missionaries pooled their funds, I guess, and dug out an area for a swimming pool, maybe kind of as big as this area here in your house. We could swim there, and it was just fed by a spring, just a little mountain stream. Oh, that’s neat. That we dammed up. They dug the earth out from the mountain and leveled an area for a tennis court, put a kind of a netting around it which would be taken down in the winter.

We had gotten Quonset huts from the military at one point. That’s another story, but they’d taken one of those and set it up as the chapel and community gathering place there. So that was where we would go.

David Hopper (33:10): Yeah, we had a little cabin. Ours was the second cabin. I guess Grandma Linton’s place was first. But in the early ’60s sometime, Daddy built that with a corrugated tin roof. He had scrounged the roof from the military. But just a clapboard house, not very big, what, 12 by 20 feet maybe. And had (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (33:45): I think it was that small.

David Hopper (33:45): It really was. It was a small (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (33:49): I hadn’t been there in a long time. That seemed okay.

David Hopper (33:52): Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s a lot smaller, smaller than I thought it was, but maybe a little bit bigger than that. But anyway, you go into a front door, you had a fireplace to the left, a main room that had windows out front, and he cut trees enough we could see a view out to the front. Then had a little partition and a bathroom on the right and a kitchenette right behind there, and the parents’ bedroom on the left, and a half loft, and a ladder up to that, that we kids would stay upstairs.

Barron Hopper (34:35): The girls were on the left and the boys were on the right.

David Hopper (34:38): And there was another spring up the hill that he had tapped a pipe to, and we had running water.

Margaret Faircloth (34:45): Just a garden hose.

David Hopper (34:46): By a hose. And didn’t have a refrigerator, but we kept stuff in a box in the stream down behind the house.

Tim Hopper (34:54): It seems like that was a place where you started to forge friendships with kids from other missions that you would maybe later know at boarding school. Is that true?

David Hopper (35:03): Not as much as other missions, but the kids from our mission, we became, the Lintons especially.

Tim Hopper (35:09): But they were in a different city, right? Yeah, right. That’s what I mean.

Barron Hopper (35:13): Lintons and the Robinsons.

David Hopper (35:14): Lintons, Moores and Robinsons. And Hoppers.

Barron Hopper (35:21): But this, looking back, tended to be the more theologically conservative people even out of our mission, do you think?

Alice Dokter (35:30): I never thought about that.

Barron Hopper (35:32): But this was all Presbyterians up there.

David Hopper (35:35): We had Australian Presbyterians.

Barron Hopper (35:38): Well, that’s right.

David Hopper (35:38): The early missionaries to Korea back in the late 1800s, they made the decision, and there’s somebody’s name attached to it, but on dividing the country up to not compete with other (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (35:59): Christian.

David Hopper (36:00): Denominations. Biblically sound but maybe theologically a little different denominations. So you had the Southern Presbyterians in the Southwest, the Northern Presbyterians in the Southeast, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Australian Presbyterians, and a little overlap of some of them that kind of mapped out the country. So we were the Southern Presbyterian section of the country, and that’s why, in the South, why we knew the Southern Presbyterian missionaries, didn’t know some of the other missionaries as well until we went to boarding school.

At Chidi San, there’s a division in mission vacation. There’s the beach people and the mountain people. The beach people, there’s Taejon Beach, there’s a missionary beach, I think a two-mile stretch of beach that they had leased or purchased or something. There were all these mission houses and a lodge and all there. And then the Chidi San people. So we went one summer to the beach.

Alice Dokter (37:23): I think it may have been two summers, but I’m not sure.

David Hopper (37:28): Anyway.

Barron Hopper (37:29): There were ostensibly guerrillas active up in the mountains, and it was thought to be maybe dangerous, so we went to the beach that summer instead.

David Hopper (37:38): But Chidi San was our center, a great center of our lives, and that month each summer on the mountains was just great.

Margaret Faircloth (37:47): It was idyllic.

David Hopper (37:48): And it was vacation time for our parents, but Daddy did his stuff, some study and all, but played a lot of games and hiked and swam and tennis.

Alice Dokter (38:00): It was annoying to us, or at least to me, because Daddy was so great with games and we would play games as a family at night, and other kids would come down and infringe on our time with our Daddy because it was so much fun at our house. We had Skittles, we had card games, we had board games.

David Hopper (38:30): Card games, primarily Rook and (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (38:33): Yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (38:34): Blinch.

David Hopper (38:34): Blinch.

Alice Dokter (38:35): Blinch. And sometimes at night, the adults would get together in one of the Linton homes or the Robinson home, and they would play late into the night and bid outrageous bids on Rook and have a great amount of time. There was no noise pollution or anything, so you could hear the adults laughing while you were going to sleep in the loft down below.

Barron Hopper (39:07): And there was no encouragement by alcohol to laugh.

Tim Hopper (39:12): An actual good time. Was there Scrabble there as well? Oh, yeah.

David Hopper (39:17): Lots of Scrabble.

Barron Hopper (39:17): They didn’t play that between families. That was in our family, I think.

David Hopper (39:22): Mostly, yeah.

Alice Dokter (39:23): Mostly Daddy and Mama played Scrabble. When they were at home in Chonju, at the breakfast table, it was always discussed who won the night before, which was usually no great surprise. Daddy would win, but my mother would sometimes say, ‘Well, I let your dad win so he would sleep well last night,’ which was a joke because Daddy could sleep on a dime. He would go to sleep and sleep for however long he wanted and then wake up.

David Hopper (39:56): There’s a little point of the hill that was Vesper Point that we would have vespers at. Could look from there 50 miles to the west to the mountain that sits over Kwangju. You could look down on the river, one of the main rivers, the Kum River running down the valley below.

Barron Hopper (40:28): You mean the Seomjin-gang.

David Hopper (40:29): Seomjin-gang.

Barron Hopper (40:30): Kum was up by Seoul.

David Hopper (40:32): You’re right, you’re right, yeah.

Barron Hopper (40:34): But anyhow.

Alice Dokter (40:35): And then there was the place, Grandmother’s Altar, that was at the other end.

Barron Hopper (40:41): That was at the old Chidi.

David Hopper (40:43): Oh, was it? This Chidi, there was Rocky Point.

Alice Dokter (40:45): Rocky Point.

David Hopper (40:46): That was about a mile hike up to Rocky Point where you could look over at the rest of the Chidi San range. And Barron, I always kept Barron on a pedestal on this stuff, but he could catch snakes so well and handle snakes. We had a box, I think a little box full of them.

Barron Hopper (41:12): I probably could do a better job as a preacher nowadays if I’d do a little snake handling, but (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (41:18): My mother, as skittish as she appeared to be in her older years, must have been oblivious to the fact that Barron was running around Chidi San catching vipers and putting them in sugar sacks that they had and carrying them on a stick. Sugar sacks were made out of, well, you used them also for dish towels.

Barron Hopper (41:46): I think a lot of this is myth.

Margaret Faircloth (41:47): No, I remember. I remember.

Alice Dokter (41:50): But he would carry them around on a stick like a hobo pack. Here are all these, and it puzzles me how he got away with that given my mother’s abhorrence of anything that wiggled. ‘Is that a bug?’

Birds and other pets

David Hopper (42:09): The other thing we left out in talking about what we did in Chonju in childhood and all, Barron and I lived with our slingshots. [Unclear] we would hunt birds and all. We were good with our slingshots.

Barron Hopper (42:23): But the birds were pretty safe, actually.

David Hopper (42:25): Yeah, well, we killed a few, but yeah.

Alice Dokter (42:27): Well, but you stole birds.

Barron Hopper (42:29): Yeah, one time a missionary came through who was an ornithologist, and he told us that crows were good pets. So we kept our eyes open. Finally, we found a crow’s nest, and I risked my life several times as the eggs progressed through babyhood. We finally got two babies out of a nest of six and brought them down, lowered them in a basket.

David Hopper (42:55): Barron would climb. Barron was a good tree climber.

Barron Hopper (42:58): Well, anyhow, we lowered (interrupted).

David Hopper (43:00): A foolish one.

Barron Hopper (43:01): And we kept them. David and I would feed them, whatever. Pretty soon they got a little bigger. We sent one down to the Lintons and we raised it up and we took it. Later in the summer, they were just free then to fly around after a while and lived around. Then when we went up Chidi San, we put them in a basket and took them up Chidi San. We left them there because they were too close to human beings. So nobody was left up there except the caretaker after us, so they probably got a pretty good start there.

But that same summer, one time I went down to visit the Lintons. Well, I guess it was when I went to take the crow down to them. The Pettises had some turkeys that some people had given them. One of the turkeys was laying eggs and they didn’t know what to do with them. They knew we had hatched some chickens, so they gave me two of the eggs and we took them home. No, they gave me one egg. The turkey wouldn’t produce another one before we left. After a week or so, my father went to a meeting in a different city, in Kwangju, and the turkeys had produced another egg, so they sent it via Kwangju to me after my father’s meeting. So we put them both in our little incubator and we kept turning and turning them.

Well, then the time was coming close for us to go up on Chidi, and all of a sudden one of the eggs did hatch. The other one didn’t hatch in time, and I broke it open and it was rotten. But then we had this one little turkey, a baby orphan turkey. What do you do with it? Well, we put it in a basket, took it up Chidi with us, and it was rainy those days. So after a day or so, it got sunny. We put it out in the yard under our fireplace screen, and about noon I heard a loud cheep and went out there. Oh, my goodness. Sadly, the turkey was dead because the crow had killed it. So that was (interrupted).

David Hopper (45:03): I didn’t remember what happened to that turkey.

Barron Hopper (45:05): That’s what happened to it.

Alice Dokter (45:06): Yep, I remember.

Barron Hopper (45:07): Crow killed it. But we had so many pets and animals that we got used to creatures dying. We had chickens and rabbits and (interrupted).

David Hopper (45:18): That goose that Daddy had winged.

Margaret Faircloth (45:21): And magpies.

Barron Hopper (45:22): Magpies. Sometimes animals would die like that, and we got kind of used to that.

David Hopper (45:29): Probably helps you handling death to see that death is part of the cycle. Mm-hmm.

Barron Hopper (45:35): And one time, one of the little chicks got stepped on and got his leg broken, just kind of mangled. So David and I, well, maybe David did it, surgically removed the foot.

David Hopper (45:48): We had a hot plate at home. We took it down to the basement. You remember that? We amputated this poor little chick’s leg and cauterized it on the hot plate. No anesthetic.

Alice Dokter (46:02): I did not know any of this.

Margaret Faircloth (46:04): Just as well.

Barron Hopper (46:05): He did fine.

David Hopper (46:06): Yeah, he grew up and learned to use his wings to propel himself a little bit and [unclear], hop around the yard until a weasel got it one time.

Barron Hopper (46:18): We would take a little chicken. There were some mustard greens growing in our backyard. There was a particular little fly that would sit on them, and David and I would each get one, and we would compete seeing which one could catch more of the flies. The little one-legged guy, he did pretty well at that.

Alice Dokter (46:34): When I came home from boarding school one time, the boys said, ‘Now, Alice, don’t go eating any of the frogs in the refrigerator.’ I said, ‘What?’ They were catching frogs and feeding them to the crow. So they would cut up the frogs and put them in the refrigerator. So you need to be careful not to eat the pieces of frogs that were in the refrigerator.

David Hopper (47:04): It was an old kerosene-powered refrigerator, in case you (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (47:08): But my mother, the boys kept the incubator in their laundry hamper, and my mother one time said, ‘Do not tell your grandmother that I’m letting the boys raise chickens in their laundry hamper.’

David Hopper (47:27): We caught an owl.

Alice Dokter (47:30): I don’t remember any owls.

David Hopper (47:31): We had an owl, and we took him down to the bottom of the basement steps, had him down there. You remember that old dingy basement? Oh, it was terrible. We had him down there because it was dark and we figured owls must like dark. We fed him crows, but we did finally feed him one of those red-bellied frogs. We had heard that they might be poisonous, but we had never found that out experientially. But we fed the crow a red-bellied frog and he died.

Alice Dokter (48:04): I did not know that story.

Margaret Faircloth (48:06): But I did know that. Thinking about red-bellied frogs. Well, can I back up just a little? I have a hard time getting a word in, but talking about Chidi, a lot of people, when they hear I grew up on the mission field, they think it must have been a very somber experience.

Alice Dokter (48:22): Yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (48:22): It was not. The missionaries were a really fun bunch of people. I always remember them having fun and having fun with them and really demonstrating for me sort of the fullness of the Christian life. It was not at all a serious, somber experience for me.

Alice Dokter (48:43): I agree. I’m on some adult missionary kid sites now, and we were very blessed. For one thing, both of our parents having been raised as missionary kids, I think perhaps helped them to know how to parent the next generation. But one of the decisions that they made was not to make us go to Korean church. We had American church in the afternoons, on Sunday afternoons, but they did not make us go to church all day, one service after another. We had Sunday school in the morning, and then we had church in the afternoon. Right. It wasn’t like we were being punished, making us go to service after service all day long. I think that was a wise decision.

Church membership

Tim Hopper (49:40): This is a technical question, but did you have membership in the sending presbytery that your parents came from, or was there an established congregation on the mission compound?

David Hopper (49:54): When we joined the church, our membership was enrolled in Montreat Presbyterian.

Margaret Faircloth (50:00): Oh, I didn’t know that.

Alice Dokter (50:02): Yeah, that (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (50:02): But what happened when you joined the church or made a profession of faith?

Margaret Faircloth (50:07): I did it in Chonju, but as a child, I didn’t think about where that was recorded.

David Hopper (50:14): Daddy submitted that to Montreat Pres, which authorized it.

Margaret Faircloth (50:20): I did not know that.

Barron Hopper (50:22): You may still be a member of Montreat Pres.

Margaret Faircloth (50:24): I might.

Tim Hopper (50:25): Is that where Grandma would have been a member?

Margaret Faircloth (50:28): Probably.

Barron Hopper (50:28): Yeah, she was too.

David Hopper (50:29): She was a member. Daddy was under whatever presbytery Davidson, that section of North Carolina is.

Tim Hopper (50:40): Interesting. So the American church would just be the mission compound? That wouldn’t have been soldiers and things?

David Hopper (50:50): Just the mission compound. Any, in America. Later on, there were a couple of other Americans in the city. The Peace Corps young people, some of them would come up to that, but we (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (51:10): It was open to anybody.

David Hopper (51:13): But we were the only Americans in town. Maybe internationally, maybe there was a Catholic priest at the Catholic church. It’d be the other white face in town. But yet we were the only white faces. When we went downtown, we’d always have, what, 20 or 40, 50 kids following us.

Alice Dokter (51:35): ‘Mi-gung-nam, mi-gung-nam,’ which meant ‘foreign devil, foreign devil,’ or ‘American devil.’

Barron Hopper (51:41): Out in the country when we were young, the old women would like to touch our hair. Margaret’s was kind of blonde, and none of ours was (interrupted).

David Hopper (51:54): Black.

Barron Hopper (51:55): And they’d want to feel your hair.

David Hopper (51:58): Margaret, it’s getting blond.

Margaret Faircloth (52:00): Working on it.

Alice Dokter (52:02): But one of the things that our parents did intentionally was to raise us as Americans. There were some families that did not particularly raise their children to be Americans. Our parents assumed that we would go on to return to the States, go to college, and then whatever we did was whatever God directed. But they chose to raise us as American citizens, learning to salute the flag.

My mother was real vocal about their trip when she was a child on a British freighter going across the ocean, about how patriotic the British were. When the flag would go by or when they would sing ‘God Save the King,’ I guess in those days, then everybody would stand to their feet and look patriotic. So we were to do the same thing. We grew up respecting our country, and Daddy, for many years, had a picture of President Eisenhower on his study wall. Actually, it may have been the same cabinet where the Kool-Aid was, but he kept a presidential picture up there. Yes. He would listen religiously to the news on the little transistor radio that he had, keep up with foreign news. He subscribed to Time magazine and read that from cover to cover.

But going back to Daddy being a member of a presbytery, yes. When he came to Korea as a young missionary, he was welcomed with open arms because, of course, he spoke Korean. Now, that would not have been the theological Korean that he needed as an adult pastor, but the first Sunday or so that he was in Chonju, he was invited to preach somewhere, and he turned them down. Why? Until it had been okayed by presbytery. That always said to me, Daddy was a man under authority. That’s one thing that I love about our Presbyterian form of government, and to know that Daddy submitted to it.

Now, you were talking about profession of faith. When I made a profession of faith, it was my mother who was telling me about being out in the country and seeing some young boys make their profession of faith. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Ask me, ask me, ask me.’ She said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to do that before we go on furlough? Wouldn’t you like to make your public profession of faith and join the church?’ So they got the man that was our station pastor at the time, Doctor, Mr. David Parks, and he schooled me in what would be like a communicants class.

Then in the home, in the downstairs of the missionaries, Grandma and Grandpa Linton, the session of Chonju met to examine me. That was all of the ordained elders, which were most of the men there, asking me various questions. I don’t remember what the questions were, but I think one involved what was the church triumphant? I’d never heard the phrase before, but I think I guessed correctly. On the way home, Daddy, walking back up the road to our house, said, ‘Alice, I think you did very well. I have seen ministerial candidates not answer some of the questions as well as you did.’

Demonstrations in Chonju

Tim Hopper (56:27): While we had a little break earlier, you had mentioned the demonstrations in Chonju. I don’t know anything about that. If you can (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (56:35): Any of y’all understand what the cause of those were? What’s that? The demonstrations in Chonju, how that came about. I never had that straight.

Barron Hopper (56:43): Well, it was church politics, and I think maybe you had a church split about that time. I don’t remember all the ins and outs of (interrupted).

Margaret Faircloth (56:58): It. Maybe it’s in Daddy’s book. It seems like it originated with some conflict in the American church that somebody brought back or something.

David Hopper (57:06): Oh, well, it’s Carl McIntire. I don’t know, I need to study up on him, but he had been to Korea. He and Daddy had some rough edges, I think. But he kind of started some stuff that led to the church splitting.

Alice Dokter (57:32): He was the Bible Presbyterian. Very legalistic.

David Hopper (57:36): Well, yeah, very akin to the Orthodox Presbyterian later on too. But that was part of the reason. But the Korean church splits easily. Daddy said that there were more Presbyterian seminaries of different Presbyterian denominations in Chonju when he left Chonju than there were Presbyterian churches in Chonju when he went. Okay.

The Korean church split, so they blamed the missionaries for something on that. The missionaries were seen as the bad guys in this church split, holding to the maybe lesser party of the church, but they demonstrated against the missionaries. They came up to the mission station, the opposition people who took the other positions came over there. They had banners and chants and marched outside the homes.

The mission meeting, which was the annual gathering of missionaries from around the whole Southern Presbyterian Mission, were there in our station then. So they came up to protest whatever side or position the mission had taken, and it broke into violence. There was the Battle of Pritchard’s Porch. There was stone throwing, and it broke into violence. Throwing firewood. Some of the mission men had to fight some people off the porch and all. We watched the more peaceful parts of it. We watched from sitting up in trees and all. I don’t remember some of the more violent stuff.

Alice Dokter (59:59): They took Daddy’s glasses off and were dangling them in front of his face, and he didn’t react violently or anything. I think his glasses got broken, but that was at the other end of the station. We were just hearing things.

Margaret Faircloth (1:00:16): I remember when it started. It was mission meeting, and so there were kids from the whole mission there, and we were playing at what had been the Lintons’ old house. I don’t remember who was living in it then, but there had been a gate on their (interrupted).

David Hopper (1:00:31): Moores may have been there then.

Margaret Faircloth (1:00:33): Yeah, there had been a gate on the driveway, and there were gateposts on the driveway. We’d been playing there, and we heard this crowd gathering down outside the gates down at the bottom of the hill, and they started banging on the gates. We climbed the gateposts up on the driveway and were watching this. They burst through those gates.

Pwong Soon-ee, my nanny, came down those steps, down the hill from our house. She moved fast. I had never seen her move fast like that. She came running down there and she grabbed me off that gatepost and carried me back up to the house. I was about five or six years old, and she snatched me out of there really fast.

David Hopper (1:01:22): Hmm.

Margaret Faircloth (1:01:22): I remember seeing the wall of people coming up that road, and they came around that curve to in front of our house. Then I don’t know what happened, but I just remember that.

David Hopper (1:01:35): It was dangerous, I think.

Alice Dokter (1:01:36): Well, they had some people from the American consulate come down. I remember hearing about, they talked about crowd psychology and about how when a crowd got incensed, you couldn’t control it or predict what would happen. So they were warning the missionaries to be careful.

David Hopper (1:02:03): Tim, do you know much about Carl McIntire? He’s the one who incited all this by saying things that led to the split of the church. Daddy did not like Carl McIntire.

Tim Hopper (1:02:18): He led an exodus out of my denomination, the OPC, a year after it was formed, and then split the church he founded after that. He was quite a character.

David Hopper (1:02:28): I think Daddy personally interacted with him.

Alice Dokter (1:02:31): There was a sign in our pantry in the old house for years that said, ‘Carl McIntire calls Joe Hopper a liar.’ It was one of those roll-up scroll banner things.

Tim Hopper (1:02:51): I would have that in my office if we still had that.

David Hopper (1:02:54): I don’t remember that. So it was in that pantry downstairs, the big pantry?

Alice Dokter (1:03:02): On the right as you came in towards the back.

Tim Hopper (1:03:04): Yeah, he was quite a bombastic individual. There’s a biography that came out about him recently that I’d like to read. I haven’t yet.

David Hopper (1:03:13): Well, if you find anything about Joe Hopper (interrupted).

Tim Hopper (1:03:15): Yeah, I wasn’t aware of that.

Barron Hopper (1:03:17): If you find anything about Joe Hopper, it’s lies.

Tim Hopper (1:03:20): If it works, before we take a lunch break (interrupted).

David Hopper (1:03:26): When we’re getting close, if y’all want to keep talking, I can run out. I’m going to run down to Little Caesars and grab a couple pizzas.

Barron Hopper (1:03:34): Pizzas were interesting too. We always grew up thinking pizzas had, instead of pepperoni, they had slices of hot dogs on them.

David Hopper (1:03:43): I don’t remember (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (1:03:45): And they were square.

David Hopper (1:03:46): I don’t remember pizzas. The first pizzas I remember were when I went to college.

Barron Hopper (1:03:50): Well, that’s because you didn’t recognize them.

Alice Dokter (1:03:54): I can remember when Mama was going to try this new thing. It was called pizza. They spread the, it was in one of those oblong brownie pans. [name unclear] thought it was very strange. You spread the bread dough in there, and then you put this tomato sauce and different stuff on it. That was called pizza.

David Hopper (1:04:23): Well, I don’t remember that. When I went to college, one of the first weeks, a group of guys said, ‘Should we go get a pizza?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I don’t remember knowing what a pizza was at all. I went down there with them and they were ordering. They said, ‘Hopper, you like pepperoni?’ I said, ‘Fine.’ I didn’t have a clue. They ordered pepperoni pizza, and I ate it. For years, I really didn’t like pepperoni after that, but I’ve learned to like it.

Barron Hopper (1:04:59): Well, hot dog pizza is what we had in Korea. I’ll just tell you.

Margaret Faircloth (1:05:04): When I went to college and had the same experience, went out for pizza, and they said, ‘Margaret, what do you want on your pizza?’ I’d never had it. I said, ‘What are my choices?’ They said, ‘Do you like pepperoni?’ I said, ‘What’s pepperoni?’ For the rest of that year, everybody teased me about ‘What’s pepperoni?’

David Hopper (1:05:21): So I’m not that different from you on that.

Alice Dokter (1:05:24): But you had the typical missionary response, David. The missionary kid response is play along and you’ll find out later.

Barron Hopper (1:05:34): That’s right.

Alice Dokter (1:05:35): You don’t acknowledge, don’t show your ignorance. That was not a mistake.

Barron Hopper (1:05:40): My first going out for pizza at college, they said, ‘Do you want anchovies on your pizza?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ Everybody was getting anchovy on the pizza.

Alice Dokter (1:05:51): But we were secure in ourselves because when we came on furlough that one time and stopped in Hawaii, the guys got Hawaiian shirts and the girls got muumuus. Muumuus fell from the shoulder, and they were ideal for going through Montreat in your bathing suit under the muumuus. Kids would say, ‘Why are you wearing a dress?’ Yeah. Say, ‘This is not a dress, this is a muumuu.’ ‘There’s no such word as muumuu.’ ‘Oh, yes, there is.’ We knew that there was a muumuu because we had been to Hawaii.

Transcript: Part 3, Furlough and Korea Christian Academy

Traveling between Korea and America

Tim Hopper (00:00): Before we got derailed on pizza, I was trying to talk a little bit about riding ships and the travel from North Carolina to Korea. What was that like, and what were those memories?

Margaret Faircloth (00:14): Do y’all remember taking the train across? I wasn’t on the train, I don’t think.

Barron Hopper (00:18): I remember. Went by Chicago at least one time.

David Hopper (00:22): That was in ‘59. Just the history of things: we came back to the States in ‘58, drove across the country. In ‘59, we took the train back across. In ‘64, we drove across and then drove back.

Barron Hopper (00:44): We drove across [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (00:45): No, we didn’t.

David Hopper (00:46): No, ‘64 was hopscotch. Yeah, hopscotch plane trip, and then we drove back, right?

Alice Dokter (00:53): Because Margaret was 4 years old and she wanted to tell everybody everything in every airport.

David Hopper (01:00): Alice, do you remember coming back to the States at the Korean War?

Alice Dokter (01:06): I only remember that we must have flown. I don’t remember going to Japan.

Barron Hopper (01:14): That was on a boat,

David Hopper (01:18): Troop ship.

Alice Dokter (01:19): When we were in Japan, I remember being in a dark barracks. There were bunk beds, and there must have been mosquito netting over the beds. It just was so dark in there, and I was supposed to use the potty, and Grandma Hopper was yelling at me, and that’s all I remember.

Margaret Faircloth (01:44): And that is so helpful, isn’t it?

David Hopper (01:46): Then our family, I don’t remember, I wasn’t born yet, but our family went over to Osaka and stayed there. I think maybe the Frank Browns were already there, I’m not sure, but we stayed in Osaka until Daddy could arrange the flight home.

Alice Dokter (02:05): Because Mama was very pregnant with you.

David Hopper (02:07): Mama would have been 30 weeks or so by then.

Alice Dokter (02:11): That may be when the Brown kids taught us, or me anyway, how to fool your parents that you had been staying up when they were gone and you were supposed to have gone to bed.

Barron Hopper (02:26): Well, it seems to me you would have been a little young for that at that time. Maybe so, but [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (02:31): Maybe so, or else that may have been when we evacuated, when we were waiting to get back.

David Hopper (02:37): You’d have only been 3 then.

Alice Dokter (02:38): Yeah, no, that would not have been that.

Margaret Faircloth (02:40): So then they flew back, right? From Japan. From Japan.

David Hopper (02:46): Actually, it was a commercial plane they flew back, I think.

Margaret Faircloth (02:49): Oh, was it?

David Hopper (02:49): Okay. And it was an early Pan Am flight.

Tim Hopper (02:52): This is 1950 we’re talking about?

Margaret Faircloth (02:55): Yeah.

David Hopper (02:55): Pan Am had started their flights, just commercial flights, just a couple years earlier, I think.

Barron Hopper (03:01): Well, I guess that was the one that I have a certificate from. Yeah, I have a certificate, crossing the International Date Line on the Pan Am.

Margaret Faircloth (03:09): Yeah, I have, I have a certificate.

David Hopper (03:11): We flew Pan Am in ‘58, I remember that.

Barron Hopper (03:16): Maybe that was the one.

David Hopper (03:17): I don’t have a certificate. Margaret has one.

Alice Dokter (03:20): I have one. When we evacuated, I remember we must have flown in through Alaska because they said, oh look, you can see the Northern Lights. And all I remember was that they were green. And then when we got back on the train, on the plane, somebody gave me this little thing that was metal. It was about this round, and you pushed a little thing and it would whirl around and make sparks. It rubbed against, the metal rubbed against something and made sparks, blue and red sparks. And they said, see, this will remind you of the Northern Lights. Hmm.

David Hopper (04:04): I believe Daddy said we stopped and refueled in the Aleutians and then on to Anchorage, and then Anchorage to Seattle.

Barron Hopper (04:18): Oh, we were coming back that way.

Alice Dokter (04:20): I just remember that one thing with the Northern Lights and the little [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (04:24): So then the next time y’all went out would have been [interrupted].

David Hopper (04:27): ‘58. You would have been a [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (04:30): I was a toddler.

David Hopper (04:31): 3-year-old.

Tim Hopper (04:31): Before we go to ‘58, in ‘53 when you went back to Korea, or to Japan, and Granddaddy was already back, did you travel, Grandmama and the 3 of you, or?

David Hopper (04:42): Daddy came back to the States and got us and took us from Quitman up to Montreat for a little while before we [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (04:54): I think we went down to Daytona Beach at that time too, didn’t we?

Alice Dokter (04:58): Yeah. We did a family vacation, it was called. Our family honeymoon. That’s when he went to Montreat, and Montreat was getting rid of their telephones. The city of Montreat was getting rid of its telephone system, which was housed in a house that was right over the Montreat stream. That was the post office. It’s across from the present tennis court there.

You could go under the building that housed the telephone operator and the post office, and because the floors didn’t meet too well, you could find money because it would drop through the holes of the [interrupted].

David Hopper (05:44): The newspaper racks were on the front porch, and coins would fall through the slats.

Alice Dokter (05:50): But you could also see the telephone operator. She was like the one on Andy Griffith. She had a headphone on and she was poking these and connecting these. There were all these telephones in Montreat that were going to be disposed of. Daddy, being the scrounger that he was, said, ‘What are you going to do with these telephones?’ And Mr. Solomon, or whoever was the chairman at the time, said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, we’ll just get rid of them or something.’ And Daddy asked for them.

At the time, we were staying not in Grandma’s house, but at the house right at the bottom of the hill from her. I can’t remember the lady’s name.

David Hopper (06:38): Saunders.

Alice Dokter (06:38): No, Saunders was next door. Yates. No, it wasn’t Yates. Miss Edwards, maybe. It was at the bottom of the hill, and it had a big porch, and Daddy built a big crate on the porch to put the telephones in. There were all different kinds of telephones. They were crank telephones.

Daddy said, ‘Well, since I’m the one that scrounged these, I get my choice of the telephones, who owns what.’ So we got Billy Graham’s phone, and that’s the one that we used. It was housed in my parents’ bedroom, right beside their bed in what had been a window that was plastered over on the back and just was a little alcove where that phone was. And so our phone number was [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (07:34): Short long.

Alice Dokter (07:36): Short long. And if you would hear a short long, you would answer the phone. If it was a long-short-long, that was the Cranes. If it was 2 shorts, that was the Seels. And if it was a really long one, that meant everybody pick up because it was a community phone and everybody could hear.

Margaret Faircloth (08:02): Station ring, station

David Hopper (08:04): Ring. I have a newspaper article from the Asheville paper on them being donated these phones.

Alice Dokter (08:10): Really?

Margaret Faircloth (08:11): Really.

Barron Hopper (08:12): About being donated to Korea?

David Hopper (08:15): Being donated to Daddy to take to Korea. They were ready to go back to Korea, but the war was still going on enough that they didn’t have clearance to go anywhere, and they stayed in Montreat. Immediately upon being given permission, they went to Japan, and Daddy settled us there, and he bounced on over to Korea.

Margaret Faircloth (08:45): How did you travel?

David Hopper (08:47): We traveled by a ship.

Alice Dokter (08:49): That was the time that the lady crossed the date line and lost her birthday, and that they made the huge cake in the dishpan.

Tim Hopper (08:59): So you take a train to San Francisco and then [interrupted].

David Hopper (09:02): Yeah.

Tim Hopper (09:03): Board a ship.

Margaret Faircloth (09:04): Did you stay at Home of Peace?

David Hopper (09:06): Yes.

Alice Dokter (09:06): Yes.

David Hopper (09:06): We stayed there for several weeks, I think. I’ve seen it in some letters. But yeah,

Barron Hopper (09:14): By the time we had been there several weeks, David and I had cased the place.

Alice Dokter (09:18): Well, and that was when Mama was trying to homeschool the 2 boys.

David Hopper (09:24): No, I was 3 years old, but [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (09:26): Okay, homeschool me and Barron. And Margaret was, no, that was the next time. Okay, when Daddy paid you a penny a day.

Margaret Faircloth (09:37): Home of Peace was a huge mansion-type house with a big porch.

David Hopper (09:44): Maybe a boarding home.

Margaret Faircloth (09:46): In the, in the Oakland, California area.

Barron Hopper (09:49): It was a, it was an institution of the Christian Missionary Alliance, I think. Yeah, go ahead, Margaret.

Margaret Faircloth (09:59): But they had turned this house into sort of a home for missionaries waiting to go out, waiting for their ship to come in, basically, to go out on the mission field, because people took freighters and their schedules were unreliable. We would go and wait there until our ship came in and we were ready to go.

They provided wonderful services. They provided food, I think, and of course a place to stay. The church people would come and crate up stuff to be shipped on these freighters, which was a wonderful service for the missionaries. They knew how to do it, and they had planes and wood.

Barron Hopper (10:40): You had time to focus on buying appliances and some things that you wouldn’t be able to get in Korea.

Alice Dokter (10:47): The man that ran the Home of Peace owned a redwood forest, and so he would bring the lumber, the redwood. The boxes were wonderful things to be used for furniture later.

Tim Hopper (11:07): What was life on the freighter like? How long did that take, even a couple weeks?

Barron Hopper (11:11): Yeah, a couple weeks, I think.

Tim Hopper (11:15): Pretty boring, or did you have activities?

Barron Hopper (11:17): I don’t remember being bored. We’d eat in the dining room where the ship people were, and there weren’t many passengers. It was a little stateroom and rooms around it, maybe, I don’t know, 8 rooms, 10 rooms, something like that.

David Hopper (11:36): We rode freighters because the freighters allowed unlimited luggage. They had a little passenger unit that would, like he said, have 8 or something rooms on it around a little main room, and we could go out on certain decks and walk. We could watch flying fish, I remember.

Barron Hopper (12:02): Yeah.

Alice Dokter (12:03): Had boat drills. What do you call them?

Barron Hopper (12:06): What?

Alice Dokter (12:06): Had to put on your vest sometimes, whatever the jackets are called, lifesavers.

David Hopper (12:15): Go upstairs and eat in the officers’ dining rooms.

Alice Dokter (12:19): I don’t remember

David Hopper (12:22): That.

Barron Hopper (12:23): I remember at least one time we went, they had little rims around the table.

Margaret Faircloth (12:27): They always did, ‘cause the motion of the ship.

Barron Hopper (12:30): Yeah, because the ship would go like this and the plates would slide. But I learned how big the waves could be in the ocean. Those ships were enormous. They weren’t little things. They would tip this way, and you could look down and see the ocean right there. It was just outside the window. You’re looking down on the ocean, and the other side you were looking up in the sky. These ships were just going like this.

David Hopper (12:57): Maybe y’all know the story, but apparently at some point we were out on the deck and I fell and rolled toward the edge. You were a little baby. Somebody grabbed me. I was 3 years old, somebody grabbed me. Yeah, I don’t remember that. Wow. So [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (13:14): Yeah, then as Mama said, within a day they had put little canvas covers all around there.

David Hopper (13:23): The first few days out of San Francisco was very rough waters as you cross the, it’s not the Gulf Stream, but whatever equivalent, until you got past that. It was very rough until [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (13:38): I remember going on the ship and it was in the evening and we were headed out toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Here you’re on this ship and you think, ‘Oh no, we’re going to smash into that bridge. It’s not high enough, we’re not going to fit under.’ And then we go by under there and there’s tons of space above.

Margaret Faircloth (13:58): I remember that from the trip when I was 4 maybe, and I remember it being evening and the color of the sky and the bridge, but we were up on the top deck and they blew the horn.

Barron Hopper (14:12): Oh man.

Margaret Faircloth (14:12): And I had nightmares that night, and I’m sure it was from that. I remember that specifically.

Barron Hopper (14:18): When they would blow their [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (14:19): [unclear]

David Hopper (14:20): I remember, probably was the next trip, probably in ‘65, being in Yokohama Harbor. Actually, we docked in Yokosuka, which is kind of a second harbor next to Yokohama Harbor, I think, which had military. There was a big cruiser right up opposite us. You remember that?

Margaret Faircloth (14:45): Yeah, they were having a ceremony on deck.

David Hopper (14:47): Yeah,

Barron Hopper (14:48): I don’t remember that.

Margaret Faircloth (14:49): Yeah,

David Hopper (14:50): Big military cruiser next to us. You would not have been there.

Alice Dokter (14:53): Yeah, that was when, no, that was when they left me in America, and Margaret wanted me to tell this story. The ship had been delayed so many times because there was a dock strike and there were all kinds of things. Rather than go and be at the Home of Peace, they stayed on the East Coast and were waiting for things to settle down.

Finally it came that they were going to be driving the next day, driving across the country and leaving me all by myself in this foreign country to go to college. I had already been to King for 1 year, so it wasn’t that foreign. But I was sitting there on the bed upstairs in Grandma’s house, and I said, ‘Mama, I just wish I could go with you.’ Mama was sorting socks or something, and she put them down, and she looked at me, and she said, ‘Alice, we have raised you to stand on your own 2 feet, and if you can’t, we have failed.’

David Hopper (16:03): That’s pretty harsh.

Barron Hopper (16:08): She didn’t want to feel any guilt about that, so she chopped it right off.

David Hopper (16:13): So did you stand on your own 2 feet?

Alice Dokter (16:15): Best I could.

Tim Hopper (16:16): So the freighters would take you to Japan, I assume, and then how did you travel from Japan?

David Hopper (16:24): In ‘59, the freighter took us from Japan down to Taipei, Taiwan, because that was my 9th birthday. I celebrated in Taiwan. And [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (16:37): With Ham Hamilton.

Barron Hopper (16:38): Was that particularly because of cargo, or was that because that typhoon was coming through? No,

David Hopper (16:42): That was because of cargo.

Barron Hopper (16:43): Okay.

David Hopper (16:44): Because it was later, then it’s after they left there, the typhoon.

Alice Dokter (16:47): We were supposed to go to Hong Kong.

David Hopper (16:49): Really?

Alice Dokter (16:50): Yeah. And we could not go to Hong Kong because the typhoon was coming and we had to outrun the typhoon to go to a deep harbor, because you did not want to be in Hong Kong with all those other ships in the event of a typhoon.

David Hopper (17:06): Are you sure that’s not, I don’t think Hong Kong would’ve been too far out the way. Are you sure it wasn’t just Taipei?

Alice Dokter (17:12): That’s what I was thinking.

David Hopper (17:13): I thought we left Taipei because the hurricane was coming.

Alice Dokter (17:16): Yeah, we did. We were supposed to go. From Taipei to Hong Kong.

David Hopper (17:20): That would be the other direction.

Margaret Faircloth (17:22): Oh,

Barron Hopper (17:22): You went to Okinawa or something?

David Hopper (17:24): We left Taipei, went to Okinawa, unloaded some stuff, and we went to church in Okinawa and then zoomed on up to Pusan to get into the harbor.

Alice Dokter (17:43): And we were the last train over the trestle before The hurricane got it and took it down.

David Hopper (17:49): Going to [unclear], yeah. My daddy had insisted on the ship crew. It was a Chinese New Year’s weekend, and all the dock workers were drunk, and Daddy insisted on getting them to unload the barges that they had put all our stuff onto in the harbor. Got them into the warehouse, and that night 50 barges went down in the Pusan Harbor.

We had a piano and freezer and all that kind of stuff would have gone down. And we took the train to Jeonju, just beat the bridge getting washed out or something.

Barron Hopper (18:37): That was ‘59?

David Hopper (18:39): That was ‘59.

Margaret Faircloth (18:42): Now, when we left Alice, so that would have been ‘65 maybe? Yeah, ‘64, ‘65. That trip, Granny Montgomery, the Cranes’ grandmother, was on the freighter with us, and I roomed with her, and she was very entertaining, and I had a great trip.

David Hopper (18:58): Betty Boyer was on the one before.

Alice Dokter (19:01): Yeah, the one before was when Betty Boyer had been dating Clarence Durham.

Margaret Faircloth (19:11): I didn’t know this.

Alice Dokter (19:13): And she gave one last letter to the purser to be mailed. Do you remember?

Barron Hopper (19:21): I don’t remember exactly.

Alice Dokter (19:22): Well, the purser had some letters that he was supposed to give to the dockhands to mail, and he forgot, and he threw this packet. We were standing on the deck above, and he threw this packet across the water, and some of the letters fluttered in. I always wondered about that. But that was the purser whose name was Pilgrim. Do you remember what Daddy said about him?

Barron Hopper (19:53): No.

Alice Dokter (19:54): He would’ve been a pill if he hadn’t been so grim.

Margaret Faircloth (19:57): I did not know about that romance. I don’t remember all

David Hopper (20:03): That.

Alice Dokter (20:03): Aunt Betty was on that trip, too.

David Hopper (20:06): She taught us how to knit.

Alice Dokter (20:08): She taught us how to knit because we had kite string that we tied balloons to and trailed behind the ship in the wake. They would bounce along. We also would tie Coke cans until they made us quit because they would cause drag and could have pulled us overboard or something like that. But she taught us to knit on pickup sticks with kite string.

David Hopper (20:40): That ship in ‘59 was the Old Colony Mariner, and in ‘65 was the California Bear.

Margaret Faircloth (20:52): California Bear.

David Hopper (20:52): California Bear.

Margaret Faircloth (20:53): The ship in ‘59, the captain was real gruff. The ship in ‘64, the captain was very friendly to me. Because of Granny Montgomery, she and I sat at the captain’s table. He was always very nice to me. He missed his grandchildren. He was the one that was named Captain Cook and looked like Captain Cook. Remember, he was British and had that white mustache.

Barron Hopper (21:22): Which time was it, ‘59 or ‘64? It must have been ‘59 when we had all the cows on board.

Margaret Faircloth (21:33): ‘65.

Barron Hopper (21:34): What?

Alice Dokter (21:34): That was ‘65. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it.

Margaret Faircloth (21:38): That was the cargo, was cows. I think pregnant cows.

David Hopper (21:42): I forget. I had forgotten that.

Barron Hopper (21:44): What?

David Hopper (21:44): I had forgotten that. Yeah.

Barron Hopper (21:46): We did. Well, I was wondering about the second cow we got. I mean, our cow [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (21:52): The second cow was Church World Service. Church World Service had brought a bunch of, I was talking to somebody about this, they were longhorned.

Margaret Faircloth (22:06): Me, I didn’t remember that.

Alice Dokter (22:07): Longhorned cows. Except ours had had his, her horns clipped, but she was white.

Barron Hopper (22:17): Right, I remember.

Alice Dokter (22:18): And we named her Chewing Gum.

Barron Hopper (22:22): You probably did.

Alice Dokter (22:22): I probably did. And she gave good milk, better than the other one, because the other one had been so traumatized by the war.

Barron Hopper (22:31): The other one died, and I remember it was a great crisis in the house. Daddy was at a meeting in Seoul or something, and here the cow had died, and Mama didn’t know what to do with the dead body.

Alice Dokter (22:42): Because, why? Tell why. Because they said if you bury the cow, they will dig him up and eat him and then sue you because the meat was bad.

Barron Hopper (22:56): Well, anyhow, the white cow we had gotten from Church World Service with the agreement that the first heifer calf would go back to Church World Service. At the moment, they didn’t need all the cows. The Koreans weren’t that interested in milk. So they gave us one on those conditions, and we took the cow.

First year, a little bull calf. Second year, a bull calf. Third year, bull calf. 7 bull calves. Oops. Finally, I think she had a heifer that was given back to Church World Service, and then the cow died or something like that. Anyhow, so she paid off our debt.

David Hopper (23:43): That’s almost biblical.

Barron Hopper (23:46): It might have been 6. It might have been 6 months. It was 7.

Margaret Faircloth (23:49): It was 7. I remember. That’s funny.

Traveling around the United States

Tim Hopper (23:52): You alluded a little bit ago to the furlough where you got to fly around the country and see different parks and things. That’s been a neat thing. Dad, you and I went to Yellowstone a few years ago, and it was your first time back since that trip, and that sounds like a really incredible trip. Can y’all share a little on that?

Margaret Faircloth (24:11): Go ahead.

David Hopper (24:12): Daddy [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (24:14): Got it from [overlapping speech].

Overlapping speakers (24:15): Time magazine.

David Hopper (24:16): Was a tightwad, but he’d seen that there was a See America plan, I guess, in Time. He went and checked in the travel bureau in Seoul, and they had Korean residency permits, so they were eligible, as residents outside the U.S., to take this thing for, what was it, $100 per adult and $50 per kid?

Alice Dokter (24:49): Children under 21.

David Hopper (24:51): For 15 days you could [unclear], or two weeks.

Margaret Faircloth (24:55): Was it 30 days? I thought it was just, I don’t remember. I thought it was 30, but I don’t remember.

David Hopper (25:01): It was just 2 weeks. Okay. But you could fly on like 13 different airlines.

Alice Dokter (25:08): You could not backpedal.

Barron Hopper (25:10): Kind of wherever you wanted.

Margaret Faircloth (25:11): So Daddy mapped out this trip for us to see, we jumped all over the country and saw, Starting in Alaska.

David Hopper (25:19): National Forest. The mission would pay standard fare from Seoul to Asheville. But Daddy just took the main airline to [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (25:32): Took it to Anchorage and then planned the trip minutely. When we left Anchorage, we began the first of the 15 days.

Margaret Faircloth (25:43): But we went to Disneyland and a bunch of national parks, Redwood Forest, Yosemite. What were some of the other

Barron Hopper (25:54): Things? We traveled around before the 15 days started. We traveled in Alaska some.

Alice Dokter (26:00): Which was limited because they had been hit by an earthquake.

Barron Hopper (26:04): A big earthquake.

David Hopper (26:05): Big earthquake was right before we got there.

Alice Dokter (26:08): And we saw, I think it was Edward R. Murrow’s house, which was sunk up to its eaves in its own front yard. You could see the eaves, but they were this far above the ground.

Barron Hopper (26:21): We had planned to go to Mount McKinley, and my father had rented a car to drive over there. And [interrupted].

David Hopper (26:30): Roads were out.

Barron Hopper (26:31): What?

David Hopper (26:32): Roads were out.

Barron Hopper (26:34): Yeah, the roads were out.

David Hopper (26:35): We drove down to Seward, which around the [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (26:39): Did we make it all the way to Seward? I thought we didn’t make it.

David Hopper (26:42): Yeah, no, we made it down to Seward. We had to go in an early morning convoy through an area they were doing construction on. We drove down just south of the Anchorage bay or whatever it is. We stopped and had our picnic breakfast, and the other cars that were in the convoy had gone on down. We drove on after breakfast, and we were the only car on the road. We went down, and that’s when we saw our first moose, when we walked down by a little lake.

Alice Dokter (27:16): My mother wanted to see a moose, and she goes, ‘Joe, there’s a lake over there. If I was a moose, I would walk around that lake. Joe, stop the car and let’s get out and walk around that lake.’ So we did.

David Hopper (27:33): And we ran upon a moose.

Alice Dokter (27:35): We were walking on this narrow path between greenery and [interrupted].

David Hopper (27:42): Bushes.

Alice Dokter (27:43): Bushes and stuff. And all of a sudden, Daddy said in a loud whisper, ‘Children, step off to the left and do not move and do not talk.’ That voice said that there was danger, so we all did as we were told. And lo and behold, this ginormous moose with all these antlers and stuff, oh my gosh, walked right by us.

David Hopper (28:13): I don’t remember him coming right by us. But anyway, that’s all right. Then we drove on down to Seward. I remember it being a little port town, a little fishing village type place. We ate at a restaurant, had fried halibut. Excellent fish. I didn’t believe that. And then we drove back that night, got back into Anchorage. Yeah, and we flew. We started our trip. That was the longest night of the year. That was June.

Margaret Faircloth (28:49): It was the longest day of the year. I remember that.

David Hopper (28:51): Because on the radio there’s midnight car races without the headlights that are being broadcast.

Alice Dokter (29:00): Daddy said, if you look out the window You will not see the sun go down. It will just go around the horizon and then it will come up the other side.

David Hopper (29:08): So then we flew

Alice Dokter (29:11): To [interrupted].

David Hopper (29:12): We left there on Alaska Airlines, which was a small airline then. We flew to Anchorage [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (29:19): No,

David Hopper (29:19): To Fairbanks and changed planes and on down to Anchorage, to Seattle.

Alice Dokter (29:27): Seattle-Tacoma Airport, where Daddy had made reservations for us at the hotel. We get to the hotel and they said they didn’t have reservations for us. Daddy said, ‘I have the letter right here that you sent me.’ And they said, ‘Oh, well, yes, but we didn’t think anybody from overseas could plan their trip 3 months in advance. We didn’t expect you to show up.’

Daddy was tough, and he said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do about it? What are you going to do about it? I have 4 children, 4 small children, and a wife, and we are tired, and we need a room.’ And so that was when, at the Swept Wing Hotel, they put us in the penthouse. Do you remember that? I don’t remember. And it was a suite.

David Hopper (30:22): I don’t remember that.

Alice Dokter (30:23): And it was really nice.

David Hopper (30:25): We flew from there down to San Francisco and changed and out to Fresno and rented a car in Fresno, and it was

Barron Hopper (30:34): Hot. It was like when we got off the airplane, it was like 117 degrees.

David Hopper (30:39): The breeze was hot in your face.

Barron Hopper (30:43): Yeah, that’s right.

David Hopper (30:44): Like a hair dryer blowing at you. And we went up to Yosemite and Sequoia.

Margaret Faircloth (30:51): I remember on that flight they had come over the loudspeaker and said something about an engine overheating, but that it was going to be fine and blah. When we landed and we got off behind the engine, these are the old prop planes, I thought that heat was from the engine. We went into the building and it was air-conditioned, and then we came out the other side and it was just as hot.

David Hopper (31:17): That was fun going to. I still remember those 2 parks. That was [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (31:22): I remember Yosemite. And what was the other one?

Alice Dokter (31:25): Yellowstone.

David Hopper (31:26): Sequoia.

Barron Hopper (31:27): Okay.

Alice Dokter (31:27): Well, we went to Yellowstone too.

David Hopper (31:29): No, but we went to Yosemite and Sequoia, then we went back to Fresno, flew down to LA.

Alice Dokter (31:35): We got lost on the freeway.

David Hopper (31:38): We stayed at the, at a

Alice Dokter (31:43): Christian Missionary and [interrupted].

David Hopper (31:44): CMA home in LA or Pasadena or somewhere there. Interstates were brand new, expressways were brand new. We pulled onto the expressway and a few minutes later we had gotten run off a ramp and were back to where we had started.

Alice Dokter (32:10): Daddy, that’s the same thing that we just passed.

Margaret Faircloth (32:13): Shut up, Margaret.

David Hopper (32:14): We stopped and got a hamburger or something, and asking directions, the little guy said, ‘Well, first of all, you’ve got to get rid of that car and get a pickup truck so you can see.’

Alice Dokter (32:28): I didn’t remember that part.

Margaret Faircloth (32:32): Now I remember the billboard was a Sun, what’s the bread, the white bread? Sun [interrupted].

David Hopper (32:37): Sunbeam.

Margaret Faircloth (32:38): Sunbeam Bread billboard that had a piece of bread going down in a toaster and then coming back up. I remember when I saw that the second time and said something to Daddy, ‘Oh, there’s that billboard.’ Dad said, ‘Shut up, Margaret.’

Barron Hopper (32:51): Oh my.

David Hopper (32:55): Then we went to church [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (33:01): Went to Hollywood Presbyterian Church. Went

David Hopper (33:03): To Hollywood Presbyterian. That’s

Alice Dokter (33:05): The first time I ever saw people in a play in a, we were sitting up in the balcony or someplace, and they marched past us singing This Little Light of Mine in nightgowns.

Barron Hopper (33:22): Oh,

Alice Dokter (33:23): I remember. And Daddy had told us, he said, ‘Now kids, this is a different kind of church, but, '

Barron Hopper (33:31): I’m not sure that was Hollywood Presbyterian.

David Hopper (33:33): That was the one in San Francisco.

Barron Hopper (33:36): Right, Oakland.

David Hopper (33:37): Later in Oakland.

Alice Dokter (33:38): Oh, okay.

Barron Hopper (33:38): But that was interesting. They had a choir. This had been a theater of some kind.

David Hopper (33:43): Had a [unclear] stage.

Barron Hopper (33:45): They had a stage. The choir came in singing on a stage up out of the floor. That was quite impressive. But then in Hollywood, this other time, we went to Hollywood Presbyterian.

David Hopper (34:02): That was the church Dick Van Dyke went to.

Barron Hopper (34:04): Well, I’m sure there are a lot of famous people at that church, and it was much more a regular church, but I remember it was a good preacher.

David Hopper (34:15): I’ve

Barron Hopper (34:16): Forgotten who it was. Maybe Ogilvie or somebody like that.

David Hopper (34:21): We went to Disney World. Then when we left LA, we flew to Phoenix because there were all these little planes. We connected multiple times. Flew to Phoenix, then from Phoenix to Salt Lake, and we rented a car in Salt Lake, went to the, is that the [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (34:44): Time we

David Hopper (34:45): Went? Yeah, to the Tabernacle.

Margaret Faircloth (34:47): I remember that, yeah, [unclear] the pin drop.

David Hopper (34:49): Yeah, and I think we saw Salt Lake. We drove by.

Barron Hopper (34:54): I thought maybe that was sometime we were driving through.

David Hopper (34:56): No, then we flew from Salt Lake to Billings, Montana, spent the night in Billings, no, rented a car in Billings and drove down to [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (35:12): Cape Girardeau?

David Hopper (35:13): No, what’s right below Montana, Wyoming, to Cody, Wyoming. Spent the night in Cody at a little motel. That’s where we went into the park, where we saw the mountain sheep right by the road.

Tim Hopper (35:33): Yep.

David Hopper (35:33): That’s the road we took in to see Yellowstone. We saw Yellowstone. We got as far as just the south end of the park where you could see the edge of the Grand Tetons down there, and then went back up and out. Flew back from Cody. I think we flew, changed planes in Idaho and down to Missouri to St. Louis. And [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (36:06): Well, sometimes [interrupted].

David Hopper (36:07): And went to, yeah, Uncle Peter’s

Margaret Faircloth (36:10): And all.

Alice Dokter (36:11): Yeah.

Barron Hopper (36:13): Sometime we went into a national park there near Denver.

David Hopper (36:17): That was driving back.

Barron Hopper (36:18): Oh, okay.

David Hopper (36:20): Actually [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (36:20): So, when did we go to the Grand Canyon? Was it that trip?

Barron Hopper (36:23): I never went to the Grand Canyon.

Margaret Faircloth (36:24): Oh.

Barron Hopper (36:25): That would have been 1960 [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (36:27): Maybe that was when you were in the military?

Barron Hopper (36:30): No, it was probably while I was in college, maybe. I don’t know, but it would have been after 1966.

Margaret Faircloth (36:37): Because we didn’t drive anymore after that, we flew. Okay, I’m gonna wait.

David Hopper (36:41): To Grand Canyon?

Margaret Faircloth (36:42): Yeah.

David Hopper (36:42): No.

Margaret Faircloth (36:43): When did I go to Grand Canyon?

David Hopper (36:45): We went to Grand Canyon,

Barron Hopper (36:48): ‘68, maybe ‘67, probably ‘68 or ‘69 maybe [interrupted].

David Hopper (36:56): When we came. Let’s see.

Margaret Faircloth (36:58): By then I thought we flew.

David Hopper (37:00): We never flew.

Alice Dokter (37:02): I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, so that was not when I was a child.

Barron Hopper (37:06): It was the spring of ‘69, I guess.

David Hopper (37:09): We bought

Barron Hopper (37:10): Maybe

David Hopper (37:10): That blue Buick Skylark in,

Barron Hopper (37:19): Well,

David Hopper (37:20): Los Angeles, I think, and drove and went by. I didn’t figure this all out.

Margaret Faircloth (37:26): At some point I remember I went to the Grand Canyon. Daddy wanted to see the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. We got up early. Went out to whatever place. It was us, and this other family got out of a station wagon and they had a dog and a little boy. Y’all don’t remember this? They took the harness off the dog and put it on the little boy and were very apologetic, but they said that the little boy knew not to go too close to the edge. I could have sworn y’all were there.

Alice Dokter (37:54): You mean the dog knew?

Barron Hopper (37:56): I wasn’t there.

Margaret Faircloth (37:56): The dog knew not to go too close.

Barron Hopper (37:57): Alice and I weren’t there.

Alice Dokter (37:59): No.

David Hopper (38:00): Yeah, when you and I, when I’d been in ‘68 when Barron had already been at PC for a year.

Margaret Faircloth (38:09): And did we drive across the continent at that time? Okay. All right.

David Hopper (38:13): Yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (38:14): We flew.

David Hopper (38:15): Anyways, we visited cousin Ruth and Uncle Peter in St. Louis and landed the 15th night. We landed in Asheville just when that ticket would have ended. And did all this for [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (38:41): And eating.

David Hopper (38:43): $100 for parents and $50 for kids. That’s a great deal. Daddy only ever knew of one other family that did that. Remember who it was?

Barron Hopper (38:56): No.

David Hopper (38:57): It was the Stokes, and we were on the same plane as them from St. Louis to Asheville or something. Somehow, somewhere in there, we were on the same plane as them. It’s the only other people we ever knew that took that same kind of a trip.

Furloughs and American schools

Tim Hopper (39:16): So what were the furloughs? First of all, how long were the furloughs? And then what were they like otherwise? Where did you stay? Did you travel around? How did school work?

David Hopper (39:24): We were 5 years in Korea and 1 year here.

Barron Hopper (39:28): Well, the first furlough we were in Montreat, and so we all had a year in public school, and that was kind of different. We rented a house in Montreat. The grandparents were there in their house, and we rented a house over what’s now on Billy Graham’s property there.

Alice Dokter (39:47): Yeah.

David Hopper (39:47): Where the parking lot of the Graham office building is.

Alice Dokter (39:51): It was called the Farriers’ House. They were missionaries to either Africa or Taiwan.

Barron Hopper (39:59): Anyhow, so that was where we lived that first thing, and we rode the school bus to school.

Tim Hopper (40:05): To Black Mountain.

Barron Hopper (40:06): Black Mountain School. You drive right back there in front of the same building where I went to school.

David Hopper (40:13): I went to 3rd grade.

Alice Dokter (40:15): Yeah, [unclear].

David Hopper (40:17): Remember your teacher’s name? It was Miss Bennett.

Alice Dokter (40:19): Miss Sorrell.

Barron Hopper (40:20): Yours was what?

David Hopper (40:20): Miss Bennett.

Barron Hopper (40:21): I remember that one. I can’t remember what my teacher’s name was, but I remember being in school. I don’t remember doing much in the school, but I did like recess. So we had played baseball.

Alice Dokter (40:35): Well, that was [interrupted].

David Hopper (40:36): I remember riding the bus.

Alice Dokter (40:37): Yeah. Well,

David Hopper (40:39): I remember riding the bus to school.

Alice Dokter (40:40): That was the year everyone got mumps. Once again, Margaret started it. Margaret got mumps.

Margaret Faircloth (40:50): Dave started it.

David Hopper (40:50): I started the mumps.

Alice Dokter (40:51): Oh, did you? Okay. Even Daddy got it, and Grandma was most concerned about Daddy because for an adult male to have mumps could go into really bad places. All of us were in bed in the Farrier house, and Grandma catered the meals.

Tim Hopper (41:13): Did you get to do other things in Montreat? We’ve spent a lot of time there as a family doing a lot of outdoor activities. Were you [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (41:19): Well, David and I played in the stream as always. One thing that year, we played in the stream. I could still show you the big rocks we played on. We’d run the stream this way and that. One day I was standing up on a big rock and I saw this thing 14 inches long, like a big fish, but it was just kind of floating down in the water. I thought, ‘Well, if I don’t catch that thing, I’ll never know what it was.’ So I jumped off in the water and grabbed it. It was sluggish, and it was a hellbender, a big salamander-type thing with big, they have, do they bite?

David Hopper (41:56): No, but they’re rare.

Barron Hopper (41:58): Well, they’re fairly extinct now, at least very rare. We had a friend, a Solomon boy, whose father was a professor of biology. We took it up to him in a bucket, and he pickled it. I think it’s still there in Montreat College, but I haven’t ever been able to get in to view it. Nowadays it would be illegal to put it in formaldehyde or something. But anyhow.

Margaret Faircloth (42:27): And that would be Barron jumping in to see what this thing was.

David Hopper (42:30): I remember seeing a big deer across the road right after church, right across from the Graham house. There’s that little roadway went down to cross the creek there.

Barron Hopper (42:40): And Daddy wouldn’t believe it, so we got Grandpa Linton there to verify that those were deer tracks.

Alice Dokter (42:47): Well, before we went to Korea after the war, I had been in kindergarten in South Georgia, and we came up that summer I guess Daddy was still in Korea. Mama must have driven us up from Quitman up to Montreat, and I went down to play in Grandma’s stream. It was by Grandma’s house, and so that meant that it was our stream.

David Hopper (43:14): I think Uncle Chick helped us move up there, but anyway, go ahead.

Alice Dokter (43:17): Okay. These kids invited me to go with them. ‘Do you want to see the queen crowned?’ Well, of course, a little girl likes to watch queens, so they invited me to their house. And [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (43:34): Who was that inviting you?

Alice Dokter (43:36): It was the Graham kids.

Barron Hopper (43:37): Okay.

Alice Dokter (43:38): Gigi and Ann.

Barron Hopper (43:40): Okay.

Alice Dokter (43:40): Were the two. Bunny was probably too little.

David Hopper (43:43): She was my age. Yes, she’s little.

Alice Dokter (43:44): We went up and there was a television, black and white. That’s all there was in those days. There was a television upstairs in their daddy’s office. We sat on a rug that was made out of a tiger skin, had one of those tigers’ mouths open. There were keys about this big all around the molding up above. I asked what those were, and those were keys to the cities, because whenever Billy Graham would go to a different city, they would give him the key to the city. They were these ornate, like that brass thing just up on the walls.

That was the summer that, when Daddy came, he said, ‘Well, what did you do today?’ ‘Played with the Graham kids.’ ‘Well, what did you do?’ ‘We played at Gigi’s house.’ ‘What did you do at Gigi’s house?’ ‘We played in the doghouse.’ ‘Oh, what was in the doghouse?’ ‘Pictures.’ ‘What were the pictures of?’ ‘Gigi’s daddy.’ ‘Who put them there?’ ‘Gigi’s mommy.’ Because they had a Great Pyrenees, big white dog called Belshazzar.

Barron Hopper (45:23): They had a going-away party for us, the Grahams did, and so I got a little favor that was a little thing you could stick coins in, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and then you could pull them back out. I remember afterwards I was lying in bed playing with that thing and I swallowed a nickel. I told Mama and Mama was so upset. She conferred with the doctor. I don’t think she took me to the doctor. Maybe the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll go on through.’ Oh my.

Tim Hopper (45:55): So then the next furlough, that one you’re describing, that was ‘50, ‘59?

David Hopper (46:01): ‘53. Oh

Tim Hopper (46:03): Yeah, ‘53. And then You were also in Montreat later, ‘59?

David Hopper (46:07): ‘59, we started in on that.

Barron Hopper (46:10): We were in school.

David Hopper (46:11): So we were ‘58, ‘59, we were there for the whole year.

Tim Hopper (46:14): And then would Granddaddy have to travel and raise support during that time?

Alice Dokter (46:19): Yeah.

David Hopper (46:19): Yeah, the Presbyterian denomination’s mission emphasis month was February. He was gone a lot then. Wasn’t it in that February that he had 26 church family night suppers in one month?

Alice Dokter (46:39): Could be.

Barron Hopper (46:40): Probably some kind of a record.

David Hopper (46:42): Put on some weight because he said all the little old ladies wanted him to have a bite of their special thing.

Barron Hopper (46:49): Some of that time we would stay with Joseph and Annis Hopper, and I remember my parents would bring back these big bags of pecans from South Carolina. I remember Granddaddy Hopper would just sit there and shell the walnuts, the pecans. So I would shell them with him.

David Hopper (47:10): I remember Grandma sitting in maybe this chair actually with her long hair going down all the way to the floor, and we would sit back there and brush it.

Alice Dokter (47:22): And she’d go, oh, that feels so good, do it again.

Barron Hopper (47:26): Huh.

Tim Hopper (47:26): And then next furlough, were you in South Carolina or where was that?

David Hopper (47:30): Georgia.

Margaret Faircloth (47:31): Georgia, in Decatur.

Tim Hopper (47:33): It’s where your other grandparents were, the Longeneckers?

Margaret Faircloth (47:36): No, it was a place called Mission Haven.

David Hopper (47:38): Yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (47:39): Mission Haven.

David Hopper (47:40): The Longeneckers were in Morristown, Tennessee. So [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (47:44): That was the year I went to college.

David Hopper (47:47): There were 2 places that the women of the church had missionary homes: Richmond, where I was born, which is Mission Court, and Mission Haven in Decatur next to the Columbia Presbyterian Seminary. They had some homes and apartments and a clothes closet.

Margaret Faircloth (48:10): It’s really very nice.

Barron Hopper (48:12): Yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (48:13): A fully equipped house.

Tim Hopper (48:14): Do you know why you were there instead of in Montreat, where you’d spent a lot of time before?

David Hopper (48:19): Probably because we had a place to stay free. But Daddy took some courses at the seminary, I think. And

Alice Dokter (48:27): The Browns were there then, weren’t they? Had the clothes closet, or did they get [interrupted].

David Hopper (48:31): No, they, no.

Alice Dokter (48:32): Oh, okay.

David Hopper (48:34): But

Margaret Faircloth (48:37): Y’all were in high school.

David Hopper (48:38): I went to 9th grade. Remember, the high school had burned, so we had split session. We went just in the afternoon.

Barron Hopper (48:47): Really? At Decatur High?

David Hopper (48:48): Decatur High. One of their buildings had burned. That’s part of why we didn’t make friends and all. It was hard to be involved in things there. Did [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (48:59): You go out for football or something?

Barron Hopper (49:01): What?

Margaret Faircloth (49:01): Did y’all go out for football?

Barron Hopper (49:03): No, I ran on the track team. It was too, well, I didn’t know football well enough to try to get on a team and all.

David Hopper (49:13): We went swimming at the Y.

Margaret Faircloth (49:14): Yeah, that’s when I really learned to swim.

David Hopper (49:17): We rode our bicycles.

Barron Hopper (49:19): I remember Stuart Babbage, the, I forget what nationality he was.

Alice Dokter (49:25): He was from Australia.

Barron Hopper (49:26): Australia. He was some kind of a theologian or a Bible scholar at Columbia Seminary. In fact, you know that book by R.C. Sproul, he mentions Stuart Babbage. That’s why.

I remember when I was in seminary there later, one of the professors told the story. He said, ‘Well, Dr. Babbage went into a used bookstore and there was a big book bin here of used books for 10 cents and a big book bin over there of used books for 25 cents. He saw one of his books in the 10-cent bin, so he just kind of slipped it over into the 25-cent bin.’

Alice Dokter (50:11): He came to King and taught at King the year before my senior year. Yeah, I guess. And he taught at King that summer. He said, ‘I just don’t like these songs, these hymns y’all sing about plunging around in the blood.’

David Hopper (50:36): We were in Boy Scouts. We went to Columbia Presbyterian, Decatur Presbyterian Church in downtown Decatur, which was a renowned Southern Presbyterian church. Dr. Davidson Phillips was [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (50:50): Yeah,

David Hopper (50:50): Was the pastor, and we went to Boy Scouts there.

Barron Hopper (50:53): Yeah.

David Hopper (50:54): Scotty Candler, who was an heir to Coca-Cola, I think, was in the patrol with me.

Barron Hopper (51:06): That was the Coca-Cola family?

Margaret Faircloth (51:09): Yeah.

Barron Hopper (51:09): I didn’t remember him.

Margaret Faircloth (51:11): That was my first experience in public school, and my folks had taken me the week before it started or something and registered me.

Barron Hopper (51:20): Did you go to Winona Park?

Margaret Faircloth (51:22): I went to Winona Park, and it was right down the street from our house. I could walk. They’d introduced me to my teacher, who was this pretty young woman, very nice. First day of school, I walked to school like I was supposed to. You had to stand in line outside. They let everybody go in. Went in, went to the classroom, sat down. She called roll, and she didn’t call my name.

While she was calling roll, there were a number of kids, when she called their name, she said, ‘You go up to Mrs. Mazarki’s class.’ And so these kids left. Wow. At the end, I hadn’t been called. ‘Anybody missed?’ ‘I was missed.’ She said, ‘Oh, you were supposed to go up to Mrs. Mazarki’s class.’ I didn’t know who Mrs. Mazarki was. I didn’t know where her classroom was. I didn’t know anything.

David Hopper (52:08): What grade was it?

Margaret Faircloth (52:09): I was in 4th grade. She said, ‘Oh, will you just go out this hall and go up the stairs and she’s at the end.’ So I go out, nobody out there, go up the stairs and walk into this classroom where class had already started. This big, older, very stern woman with a perpetual scowl on her face was Mrs. Mazarki. I was told this was the combination room and there was 3rd and 4th grade in there.

Well, I thought I was being put back a year. I didn’t have any idea what was going on. It was terrifying for me. It turned out they didn’t have enough classrooms, and so they did one room where they would combine kids, and she taught the 2 grades. But I didn’t know that. It was a bad day for me.

Barron Hopper (52:55): I guess Joseph went to Winona Park, if I remember right, much later.

Alice Dokter (53:02): The furlough before, when I was in public school and the boys were in the Black Mountain School, in those days you did not pre-register. Daddy dropped me off at the middle school and then took them down to the elementary school. He said, ‘Now Alice, just run up the stairs and go to the principal’s office and tell him what grade you’re in and he’ll tell you where you’re supposed to go.’ So I went up and I waited in line and got up to the principal’s desk.

David Hopper (53:36): Obviously hovering parents. Really? Helicopter parents. Okay.

Alice Dokter (53:42): He asked my name. I told him my name. He said, ‘What grade are you in?’ I said, ‘7th.’ He said, ‘Let me see your report card.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a report card.’ ‘Did you lose it?’ I said, ‘No, sir. I’ve never had a report card.’ ‘Then how do you know what grade you’re in?’ The term homeschool had not been invented yet. So I said, ‘My mama told me.’ And he said, ‘Take her up to Mrs. Sorrell’s room and we’ll figure out where she goes later.’

Of course, I stayed in Mrs. Sorrell’s room. One time when the next class over, the 8th graders, were without a substitute teacher, they said, ‘Alice, run over there and tell them about growing up in Korea.’ And so that’s what I did.

David Hopper (54:31): I don’t remember anything about the classroom and the classes and all that.

Barron Hopper (54:35): Well, in Black [overlapping speech].

David Hopper (54:36): Mountain,

Barron Hopper (54:38): In 4th grade,

David Hopper (54:39): Had one [overlapping speech].

Barron Hopper (54:39): Friend all through the year. If you made a mistake or something, you had to put a penny in a little bank up at the front of the school. By the end of the year, there were like $7 up there in this thing. I didn’t know how much was in there. I didn’t know what they would end up doing with the money, but one day everybody was all excited and they made a big announcement. It was right before we were going to go back to Korea, and they were going to give it all to me.

That was interesting to me. In other words, I was kind of unique heading out overseas and all. But there was one boy in the class, Lester Blackburn, I think was his name, Blackwell. Yeah. He sometimes wouldn’t have shoes on, and I thought, ‘Man, they should have given that to him.’ But I wasn’t really confident enough with all these kids all excited giving me this money to give it to Lester to get him some shoes with. But anyhow, that was one of them.

David Hopper (55:44): My one friend that year was a boy named Wesley Melton from Black Mountain.

Barron Hopper (55:48): Wesley Melton?

David Hopper (55:49): Yeah, Wesley Melton. And Wesley was killed in Vietnam, got a Congressional Medal of Honor. Huh. Because I tried to look him up.

Barron Hopper (55:59): I remember one little girl named Sherry invited me to come to her Baptist church there on Montreat Road one Sunday night. My parents, I guess, helped get me there or something, and we went to church together. She was very nice. No, I think she was trying to convert me.

Margaret Faircloth (56:19): I don’t know that was it, Barron.

Barron Hopper (56:21): We were 4th grade, Margaret.

Korea Christian Academy

Tim Hopper (56:26): When you’re ready, I’d like to jump back to Korea and talk about the teenage years in KCA, unless there are more furlough stories.

Alice Dokter (56:35): I was the first boarding school student, the reason being my parents did not want there to be a school that was across one river and 2 or 3 bridges that had been bombed during the Korean War. They and another group of Southern Presbyterian parents got together and started this school in Taejon, which was halfway between us and Seoul, and it would be a boarding school.

Only, I was the first child, the oldest child on the station. The Brown kids were, at the time, going to Japan. They lived with their aunt and uncle in Japan and attended a school there. But for our boarding purposes, I was the first one, and I went and lived with [name unclear], the principal, and his wife, who had a baby girl. We lived in various different homes, because for the first 2 years, I guess, the dormitories weren’t built. For the first year, I guess it was.

Then, after Christmas, some Canadian girls had learned that there was a boarding department. Their parents sent them from Edae, which was not that far from Chonju. There were 2 sisters that I roomed with. By that time, we were living in a room in the school, and it was our dormitory room. It would later be a classroom.

The second year, I guess, they started putting up the girls’ dorm. It was the girls’ dorm and the boys’ dorm, and there was one wing for each. Then the next year, they built what became the girls’ dorm across the quad from where it was. It was wonderful to me to be in a school with other people, although it was very lonely and scary to be by myself. So I felt much better after Christmas when there were 3 of us. There would be day school kids that would come from the Baptist mission that was right proximal to us. It was up on the hill. Their students would come. In the daytime, we would have more kids than just the boarding department. It was just fun to be with other kids in my class because in Korea, I had always been homeschooled and that was just me.

Tim Hopper (59:36): So for all of you, with the exception of furlough, were you at KCA from, 7th grade on. 7th to 12th grade?

David Hopper (59:43): Boy, I didn’t want to go. I just, even though you guys were there, I did not want to go. I cried. I didn’t want to go to KCA.

Barron Hopper (59:56): I don’t remember fighting going to KCA, but it was very strange. It was such a total change in life. David and I were great buddies, and we’d do stuff with chickens and all kinds of animals and spend our day. We’d go down to the market together and play outside with Korean friends. Here I was with these American kids, and that was really hard.

I wasn’t somehow either as good a student or as well prepared as the other kids. I got to KCA and there were like 5 girls in my grade and maybe 1 girl 1 grade up who was with us, Barbara, I think. I remember we went up to the Bozeman’s house for our English class. They were working on spelling, and I got the word tomorrow and I spelled it T-O-M-O-R-R-O-R, and that sounded pretty good to me. Tomorrow. Well, there were these 5 girls there, they all laughed, and that was hard. It was Dottie Robinson, Barb, not Laura Bozeman and Carol [interrupted].

David Hopper (1:01:10): Stokes. Who?

Barron Hopper (1:01:11): Carol Stokes. I can’t remember who all else, but there were 5 of them, I think. And [unclear] was in your grade, I guess.

David Hopper (1:01:22): [unclear] and Crim were in my grade.

Barron Hopper (1:01:25): Well, anyhow, at

David Hopper (1:01:26): That point,

Barron Hopper (1:01:27): Anyhow.

Tim Hopper (1:01:27): So far all you’ve told us about your schooling, Uncle Barron, is that you liked staring out the window and recess. So [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:01:33): What? That’s right. They didn’t have any questions on the test about the habits of orioles.

David Hopper (1:01:38): Do you remember the little boy from Pentecostal or something mission?

Barron Hopper (1:01:45): From what mission?

David Hopper (1:01:47): Pentecostals or something. They drove in a little Japanese minivan thing. They would come into the gate, their massively obese parents.

Barron Hopper (1:01:58): That was the Hills.

David Hopper (1:01:59): Hills, okay. And this little boy, he was short and obese also. He would go running across the yard. There’s a ditch out there in the front yard of the school building. He would trip in the same place, bounce back up and run every day.

Barron Hopper (1:02:18): Well, by the time I went back to teach there at KCA, his parents had adopted triplets, 3 Korean boys. I think one of them died. It was like Abraham Lincoln Hill, Douglas MacArthur Hill, and I forget what the third Hill was. George Washington Hill, that was what it was.

But then I came here down into Seymour, Tennessee, and they were known in the Johnson Bible College community. That was interesting to me.

David Hopper (1:02:48): Weren’t they a Pentecostal or something group? Maybe not.

Barron Hopper (1:02:51): Something like that, yeah. Church of [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (1:02:54): Assemblies of God, Church of God, something like that.

Tim Hopper (1:02:57): Uncle Barron, I was told to ask you about your prowess in killing rats while you were at KCA.

Barron Hopper (1:03:01): Well, sometimes you got it, sometimes you don’t. At KCA, they decided to dedicate a field right by the school. It probably belonged to the school, dedicated to being an athletic field. And there were lots of rats living [interrupted].

David Hopper (1:03:21): Rice paddy tiers.

Barron Hopper (1:03:22): It was right next to rice paddies. In the dikes, there were all these holes and all the rats lived there. I or somebody proposed, ‘Well, let’s see how many rats we can kill.’ And I think I’m [interrupted].

David Hopper (1:03:38): And the prize, you kept your tails on a string. We tied them together.

Barron Hopper (1:03:42): That’s right. I thought, what do you do to prove that you’ve killed these rats?

Margaret Faircloth (1:03:45): How did you kill them?

Barron Hopper (1:03:46): I don’t remember.

Margaret Faircloth (1:03:47): Did you have a BB gun?

Barron Hopper (1:03:48): No, we made a simple [interrupted].

David Hopper (1:03:50): It beat Samson. Collecting the foreskins, okay?

Alice Dokter (1:03:56): I was wondering if somebody was going to say that.

Barron Hopper (1:04:00): Well, anyhow, so I seemed to get the most of them. I guess other people weren’t that interested.

David Hopper (1:04:08): We would go down there and dig into a tunnel of them, and rats would come running out and we’d whack them and kill them. But I was eating in the dining hall when we were doing that campaign. We were in the dining hall in the main school building there. From my seat, I saw a rat heading down the hall of the school. I upped from the table, raced down the hall, stepped on him at a full run, squashed him, and, ooh, I had me a rat. Ew.

Barron Hopper (1:04:47): Well, one time, at the same time the government had the other thing that I forget we talked about earlier.

David Hopper (1:04:55): The Christmas trees.

Barron Hopper (1:04:55): What? Christmas trees. It was the same dictator. I think Park Chung-hee had come in, and he wanted to get rid of all the mice and rats. You could bring mice or rat bodies to such and such a place in town. If you gave them a certain number of dead bodies, they would give you a pencil.

Well, David and I figured out these mice are much easier to deal with than the rats and much smaller too. You could go out in the rice paddies and any grasslands around, and they would build these little nests that would kind of hang up in the top of the grain or the grass, and you could just look around and find them. If you found them, then you’d get all these little fingertip-sized mice. And so we got lots of pencils.

David Hopper (1:05:46): I’d forgotten that. That reminds me of the little girl, the daughter of the missionaries in South Sudan. We were cleaning out their grain storage closet and got into all those little nests of rats, and had all these little babies in a cardboard box. This little 3-year-old or whatever, 2 or 3-year-old, she wanted to have one for a pet. Her dad said, ‘No, you can’t.’

She would be taking one at a time and feeding it to the cat, and the cat would enjoy it. After about 10 of them, the cat was, ‘Do I have to eat another?’ I’m sorry, that’s another story.

Barron Hopper (1:06:31): Oh my, what in America? People think we’re so cruel.

David Hopper (1:06:37): But anyhow, life

Barron Hopper (1:06:39): Of

David Hopper (1:06:39): Missionary kids. What’s that?

Alice Dokter (1:06:43): So are your progeny going to think that?

Barron Hopper (1:06:46): Yeah, well.

Boy Scouts

Tim Hopper (1:06:47): In boarding school, is that when you were able to get involved in Boy Scouts?

Barron Hopper (1:06:52): Yeah, when I first went to KCA, it was only Peter Robinson and me interested, I think, or maybe the Brownlee boy did. Anyhow, they arranged that we could be part of a Korean troop or make a troop under Korea. That never really worked out. We went to one or two meetings, and I did learn some songs that I still remember. But then shortly afterwards, and I guess when David came, our troop was gotten up and, yeah, we participated. It’s true. I enjoyed it. The thing [interrupted].

David Hopper (1:07:33): It was under the [unclear] Council.

Barron Hopper (1:07:36): Yeah. One of the great things about Boy Scouts, just like in America, I think, is it introduces you to a lot of things with all the merit badges. Who would have thought as a kid you would think about looking at the stars and the constellations and going to visit mines and all kinds of things? Making you get out and camp out a certain amount and all this.

Alice Dokter (1:08:03): You need to talk about the Boy Scout jamboree at the beach.

Barron Hopper (1:08:07): What about it?

Alice Dokter (1:08:08): The American military put on a Boy Scout jamboree camp one summer at the beach. I don’t remember if you were old enough or if it was just Barron, but the American military was providing the meals, which included little boxes of cereal. Oh yeah. No American child in Korea had regular American cereal, dry cereal, on a regular basis. Those were little boxes of single serving, and you could tear them open and put milk in them and use them as the container for the cereal that you ate. Well, Barron [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:08:56): Probably why I have diabetes now.

Alice Dokter (1:08:58): The boys, it was supposed to be, how long was it, a week or something like that?

Barron Hopper (1:09:08): I think it was a week, maybe 2.

Alice Dokter (1:09:11): If it was 2 weeks, then it was in the first week. At any rate, the military had figured out the supplies that they needed for this number of boys for this number of days. However, they were not aware that the boys would want to start a contest of who can eat the most for breakfast. Within a short span of time, the military had been eaten out of cereal that they had planned for the kids to use for the whole time. And so they had to restrict them to just 2 or 3 boxes of cereal per breakfast.

Barron Hopper (1:09:49): Okay. Yeah, but I remember going to, that was Camp Sea Range, it was called. It was at a Hawk missile site, I think. It was a missile site there.

David Hopper (1:09:59): It was a missile test. What? It was their test site. Each of their 7 or 9 or something batteries down the Korean Peninsula, it was part of the early warning border, but each base would yearly take a missile to Camp Sea Range and fire it off to test fire, to practice. Okay,

Barron Hopper (1:10:26): Well,

David Hopper (1:10:28): So it didn’t have missiles the rest of the year when they weren’t test firing. It was just an empty base, and that’s when they used it for the scout camp.

Barron Hopper (1:10:35): I see.

Tim Hopper (1:10:36): Wasn’t there some kind of story where you were camping and there was a North Korean boat sank, or did I make this up? Maybe I watched a movie and thought it was you.

David Hopper (1:10:44): No, there were actually some North Korean spies. There was Camp Sea Range, and about 10 miles inland from there was one of the missile battalions. Some spies had broken into the base there, and they were a little afraid for us, and added security because we were doing an overnight, my Order of the Arrow campout. Campout.

Tim Hopper (1:11:21): Ordeal, yeah.

David Hopper (1:11:25): During that, they would just take us out on one section of the base, and you’d be dropped out at night, and you had to find yourself a place to camp out and make do. And yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (1:11:40): Were you still in Korea when the Pueblo incident happened?

David Hopper (1:11:44): It was when the, what happened?

Margaret Faircloth (1:11:45): Pueblo incident.

David Hopper (1:11:46): Right after I came to college.

Margaret Faircloth (1:11:48): Okay, because I was at KCA then. And they had us do evacuation drills and keep a packed suitcase under our beds. It was very tense then.

Alice Dokter (1:11:57): I heard about that right after Christmas vacation, because I had been at Grandfather Longenecker’s house, and he got a call from King College saying that the local Bristol television station wanted to interview me about growing up in Korea. When would I be back, and when could I do it? So we set up a time. Well [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:12:21): Was that because of the Pueblo?

Alice Dokter (1:12:22): No, it was before then. And so I was in the dressing room getting ready to go on stage or whatever you call it in front of the camera when I heard about the Pueblo. And I did not want to be asked about any of those questions.

David Hopper (1:12:42): Maybe it was my senior year.

Alice Dokter (1:12:44): I did not want to be asked questions about that because I didn’t want to speak out about Korea. Fortunately, whoever interviewed me had not heard the news report, which I had caught, and did not ask me any questions.

Subsequently, when I went back to campus, and I don’t remember the questions that he asked or anything, I started monitoring all newscasts because the problem was it was a tiny tidbit and I was interested in what was happening in Korea. They would give different little tidbits of information on the half hour. I carried a transistor around with me and between classes and everything I was listening. We didn’t have internet so you couldn’t catch up on news.

David Hopper (1:13:35): That was January ‘68, yep.

Alice Dokter (1:13:38): That would have been my senior year.

David Hopper (1:13:40): You know, I have a picture of me standing by the Pueblo in Pyongyang.

Margaret Faircloth (1:13:44): No, the thing I remember [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:13:46): You saw it when you were up there?

David Hopper (1:13:48): It was taken on the west coast, east coast of Korea, and somehow at night, somewhere along the way, the North Koreans managed to move it from Wonsan Harbor all the way around to [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:14:06): Other side of Korea.

David Hopper (1:14:08): The other side of Korea. I don’t know how Army personnel and navies and all let them do that without America trying to recapture it. But it’s docked on the river in Pyongyang, though [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:14:25): Maybe they sail it back around the world.

David Hopper (1:14:29): Maybe so.

Barron Hopper (1:14:30): Instead of going around Korea.

Margaret Faircloth (1:14:31): The thing I remember about that was that we all had to have an evacuation plan.

David Hopper (1:14:38): I do remember that. We were at KCA, yeah.

Margaret Faircloth (1:14:40): We were at KCA and talking to Mama and Daddy, and them saying that if we had to evacuate, they would come and get us, but they would send us to the States, and they would stay, and we were to go to you. And that we were old enough [interrupted].

Alice Dokter (1:14:59): And I did not know any of this.

Margaret Faircloth (1:15:01): And they were going to stay.

Alice Dokter (1:15:02): Wow. That’s

Margaret Faircloth (1:15:03): What I remember.

Barron Hopper (1:15:04): Well, I was in college, but they must have said that you were going to stay with Alice.

Margaret Faircloth (1:15:09): That’s what they said,

David Hopper (1:15:10): Yeah. They didn’t trust you.

Barron Hopper (1:15:11): Wow.

Alice Dokter (1:15:12): Well, no wonder. Then he left college and went into the military without telling his older sister.

Barron Hopper (1:15:18): Well, that would make things secure.

Alice Dokter (1:15:19): I got a call from the second brother saying, ‘Barron did not want me to call you until he was on the bus.’ ‘What bus?’ ‘Oh, well, he decided to drop out of college and enlist in the service.’ ‘What?’

Barron Hopper (1:15:34): See, and they’re fixing my ears now for me. Just think about that.

Margaret Faircloth (1:15:40): It was a good deal for you, huh?

Alice Dokter (1:15:43): That’s right. I was the senior member of the family in this country, and here I was in dereliction of duties because Barron was going into the military during Vietnam. And I had no say in the matter.

Barron Hopper (1:15:58): Well, that was right.

Later years at KCA

Tim Hopper (1:16:00): I’d like to hear more about the college years in a little bit, but if there’s any more talk about KCA, I’d like to wrap up that and then move on to leaving Korea.

David Hopper (1:16:10): In the dorm at KCA, the guys were in one dorm opposite the gals. The first 2 years that I was there, Barron was in the dorm with me and Alice was across the way, I guess. I remember getting pretty sick, I guess it was the flu, and being over in Aunt Betty Boyer’s. She was a school nurse and dorm mother for the women. She put me in the extra bedroom in her apartment and watched over me. Aunt Betty had raised me. I mean, she’d known me all my life. Yeah, but that’s the first time anybody ever told me that I snored louder than anybody they’d ever heard.

Tim Hopper (1:17:05): And was it the last time?

David Hopper (1:17:07): Last time was my wife before I got CPAP.

Barron Hopper (1:17:13): I thought maybe it was your grandkids and nephews and nieces when [overlapping speech].

David Hopper (1:17:17): We [overlapping speech].

Barron Hopper (1:17:18): Went camping up on [interrupted].

David Hopper (1:17:19): Well, they used to say I shook the house and all, but CPAP cured that. Anyhow, we lived in the dorms, and 100 yards away was the school building. We’d go over there for our meals. We guys weren’t allowed in the girls’ dorm or vice versa. We had dorm parents, different people over the years. I remember, I guess it was Ralph English was there for a while.

Barron Hopper (1:17:57): The first year, were the Groeschels ever there while you were there?

David Hopper (1:18:02): No, that was before me.

Barron Hopper (1:18:04): That was the first year.

David Hopper (1:18:04): And then we had, who was it there?

Barron Hopper (1:18:09): Alma Steading.

David Hopper (1:18:10): Ms. Steading took over until Ralph English came and he took over the boys. Ralph English was there in the dorm. He was living way down in room 1. I was all the way around in room 9.

Barron Hopper (1:18:25): So you could get away with murder.

David Hopper (1:18:28): I remember I was rooming with Steve Linton. Oh my, trouble. We listened early morning to the radio, to the news, and turned it on. It said the president is dead, and Kennedy had been shot. We ran down. I woke up Mr. English and told him Kennedy was dead. He yelled at me, ‘You don’t joke around this way.’

Alice Dokter (1:18:57): That’s exactly what happened to me in the girls’ dorm. I had the radio on waking up, and I heard that Kennedy had been shot and killed. I ran screaming down the hall of the girls’ dorm, and Aunt Betty was our dorm mother, and she came out and she said exactly those words: ‘Alice, you don’t joke about that.’ I said, ‘It’s no joke.’ And [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:19:25): Who was that?

Alice Dokter (1:19:26): When Kennedy was killed?

Barron Hopper (1:19:28): Who was that you’re talking about?

Alice Dokter (1:19:29): Betty Boyer. Aunt Betty Boyer.

Barron Hopper (1:19:31): Okay. Well, that day I was in 9th grade, I guess, but I was up in Seoul arranging for the yearbook. Thomas Shim had shown me how to do things. I was only in 9th grade, but I had traveled up to Seoul, spent the night in a Methodist guest house, or maybe it was Northern Presbyterian guest house, and I was going to eat breakfast, I think, with one of the missionaries.

I went to eat breakfast with him and he said, ‘Well, Barron, I got some sad news for you, that President Kennedy was assassinated.’ So I remember that. Then that day, I was selling advertisements for the yearbook. I had to go to the Bondo Hotel for one of the ads. The Bondo Hotel was across from the American Embassy. I remember seeing the flag at half-staff on the embassy because of Kennedy.

Alice Dokter (1:20:29): Mama and Daddy said that day people from all over the city came to give their respects and to say how sad they were that the president had been killed.

Barron Hopper (1:20:40): I was the editor of the yearbook that year, and it wasn’t right for me. I was too young, but there were various things that had been done by other people already that they needed to get done and that I knew how to do. I took care of them, but it wasn’t right for me. I did that a lot in high school.

David Hopper (1:21:01): Well, you sure had a lot of leadership stuff. I always felt like [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:21:06): Too much. It was too much for me, and I didn’t do other things in high school that I’d rather, I should have done. But anyhow, I just did things like the yearbooks, for instance. You’d expect people to have some sort of literary or aesthetic understanding of putting pictures on the page. I would just, ‘I’m getting this done and this is it.’ If you don’t like it, well [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (1:21:36): Part of that was just the high school was so small.

Barron Hopper (1:21:38): Yeah.

Alice Dokter (1:21:39): Yeah.

Tim Hopper (1:21:40): Margaret, you were there after everybody else. Did you have a different experience, do you think? Similar?

Margaret Faircloth (1:21:46): Similar. I mean, it was bigger. There were probably more kids there. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I don’t have anything major to share. I think we had more sports stuff, maybe. We played other American high schools in the country. There were like 3 of them.

Alice Dokter (1:22:04): You were in Little Women.

Margaret Faircloth (1:22:07): I was in the play of Little Women. Y’all were in plays, I remember.

Barron Hopper (1:22:11): Yeah, I wasn’t a very good actor either. I just did it because it was [interrupted].

Margaret Faircloth (1:22:15): I wasn’t either.

Barron Hopper (1:22:16): They needed somebody.

Margaret Faircloth (1:22:17): Yeah, no, but I’m not a drama [interrupted].

Barron Hopper (1:22:19): When I went there in 7th grade, I was the smallest boy in the junior-senior high school. At recess, or whatever, physical ed, we would always divide into 2 teams and play football. Frank Groeschel, the principal, weighed 350 pounds and he had played pro football.

They would always choose up and there were bigger boys on one side and some of the bigger boys and me, small boy, and Groeschel would be on the other side. Whenever it came time for our team to have the ball, Frank Groeschel would say, ‘Now I’m going to give the ball to you and you just run behind me.’ He would just blast them out of the way. And so I’d get the glory, carrying the football.

Tim Hopper (1:23:09): Those years, was KCA on kind of an American schedule, like August to June or something? Yes, it was. You’d be back in Jeonju during the summers?

Alice Dokter (1:23:18): During the time that I was there, just about every spring, the Korean university students would try to topple the government, and they would give threats about how they were going to march north and join with North Korea and all this other type of stuff. The military government would close them down. All meeting, gathering places were dangerous because they could spawn these demonstrations.

They would close the schools early in the spring and send all the kids home. It did not make me happy that they never closed KCA or sent us home. We always still had to go to school same as usual.

Margaret Faircloth (1:24:11): You didn’t rebel enough.

Alice Dokter (1:24:12): That’s true.

David Hopper (1:24:13): I always liked that verse, in the spring of the year at the time that kings go to war.

Margaret Faircloth (1:24:19): I remember, here’s a story on David. In 7th grade, my first birthday away from home, early that morning David came over to the girls’ dorm and brought me a present with 2 necklaces in it.

Barron Hopper (1:24:34): Necklaces?

Margaret Faircloth (1:24:35): Yeah, and I still have them, or at least the charm part of them. Huh. That meant a lot to me.

Barron Hopper (1:24:42): I didn’t know he had it in him.

Margaret Faircloth (1:24:43): I didn’t either, and I was so surprised because he would have had to buy them in Seoul, you know, sometime before when he was there. He would have had to plan ahead to do that.

Barron Hopper (1:24:51): Well, I think I taught you a lot of things, David, but I don’t think I taught that to you.

Margaret Faircloth (1:24:56): I was amazed.

David Hopper (1:24:57): One of the things I remember at KCA was when it came time to take college boards, and I don’t remember having taken any standardized testing before I took college boards. I had to go up to Seoul, and we spent the night in a yugwan somewhere, in an inn somewhere, and then took a cab or something across Seoul to the Seoul American School and went into this classroom, and we took the test.

It was kind of interesting taking this test. The college board, they had, I remember, a map image, and you were to try and figure out what the distance from here to there was, like an old road map. Yeah. It has it on there. I was trying to figure out how to read a map and things like that, things that we never did in Korea.

But I took this test. I came out of there thinking, ‘Well, I didn’t miss any of the math.’ Turned out I must have missed a few. But that was really scary, going to take College Boards and not knowing anything about taking standardized tests.

Margaret Faircloth (1:26:24): Well, one thing that was different in that time period from now is now kids prepare for years for these tests, and we just went and took them.

David Hopper (1:26:35): That was truly a test then.

Margaret Faircloth (1:26:36): But the same was true for my husband. He said he had no idea what he was doing. He just was told he needed to go take this test, and he went and took the test. So it was just a different age.

Transcript: Part 4, College Years

Returning to America for college

Barron Hopper (00:00): At least when I got to college, Alice and I flew back from Korea together.

Returning to America for college

Unidentified speaker (00:05): With Dotty.

Returning to America for college

Barron Hopper (00:07): What?

Returning to America for college

Alice Dokter (00:08): With Dotty.

Returning to America for college

Barron Hopper (00:08): Dotty.

Returning to America for college

Barron Hopper (00:09): And we flew into Asheville, and I guess I spent a few days there with Grandma Hopper. But George Brown, my cousin, was getting married there that weekend, so Alice was going to go to the wedding. But I had to get on a bus and go down to Clinton, South Carolina, for orientation.

I got on the bus in Asheville, got down to Greenville, South Carolina. I was supposed to change buses. I changed buses, and then I got to the edge of Clinton, South Carolina, got off the bus, and my bag wasn’t there. So there I was at college. I had never met anybody. I did not know anybody. I’d never been there before. I was 18. And I didn’t have a suitcase.

But they had assigned me a roommate. His name was Hope Curry. He was a good guy. In fact, I had met him in clubs in Montreat back probably when I was about 10 years old, and I remembered him. I don’t know if you remember me. And he played tennis. We played tennis together and stuff. But anyhow, that was a hard beginning, I’ll tell you that. You want to be, like Alice says, you want to be blending in. It was hard to be, but Hope was much bigger than me. He loaned me some clothes, and here these baggy clothes on me, and it was just a mess.

Returning to America for college

Margaret Faircloth (01:33): How did you (interrupted)?

Returning to America for college

Barron Hopper (01:33): Well, about three days later, that was like a Friday or Saturday, on a Monday or Tuesday, they found my suitcase and gave it back to me. But you were trying to be meeting people and stuff.

Anyhow, there was one woman that was helpful, was Susan Hensley or something like that.

Returning to America for college

Unidentified speaker (01:53): What?

Returning to America for college

Barron Hopper (01:54): Susan Neville, that was who it was. And she later ended up in Montreat, but she was a daughter of missionary parents in Congo, I think, and she watched out for me some, but that was messy.

David Hopper (02:08): My folks came back when I came back to college.

Tim Hopper (02:11): Back for furlough, right?

David Hopper (02:12): For furlough. They took a six-month furlough, brought me back to college in ‘68. And so they dropped me off at college so I didn’t just wander in there cold.

Margaret Faircloth (02:27): Like Barron did.

David Hopper (02:29): But I was known as Hoppy’s little brother.

Barron Hopper (02:36): she was gone.

David Hopper (02:36): She had just graduated. So

Tim Hopper (02:38): That’s Aunt Alice.

David Hopper (02:39): So the other classmen, the freshmen I didn’t know, but they were all green also. But still, that to me was still a shock. King was a tiny college, but there were 120 or something came in with my freshman class, 110 or 120, and that was huge. I graduated with six in high school. And that was huge for me and pretty stressful.

Tim Hopper (03:19): Um.

David Hopper (03:20): So, um,

Tim Hopper (03:21): We talked earlier about the pizza ordering. Were there other culture shock things? I mean, the size change is one thing, but just culture and American culture, East Tennessee culture perhaps?

David Hopper (03:34): I didn’t know sports much and things. We had played tag football at KCA, but I didn’t know sports. When people go to the high school games, we didn’t have college football, but people go to the high school games. I went a few times. I didn’t know how to watch sports.

Tim Hopper (03:56): You didn’t teach your son either, so.

David Hopper (03:58): I had never seen golf, and so I took golf that first semester in phys ed. And that was interesting. It kind of stuck tighter than anything else in college, probably.

But no, I just felt lost a lot. I got to know some kids. There was one girl who was from the church in Callaway, Virginia, that Daddy had pastored before he went into missions, and

Barron Hopper (04:33): Is that Janie?

David Hopper (04:34): Janie’s little sister, Donna. I got to know Donna pretty quickly. We made some friends pretty quickly. But yeah.

Tim Hopper (04:47): How about you, Aunt Alice? What was your experience coming back?

Alice Dokter (04:50): Well, the first time I saw the campus at King was when my parents were taking me there to attend. We did not go visit colleges back in those days. We drove up in a car from Mission Haven in Atlanta, and we took a returning upperclassman, Ellen McElwain, whose parents had been missionaries in Japan.

And I got on my hall, and they said, “You need to go meet your big sister.” Oh, okay. They told me her room number, and that was Sally Van Sweden, and she was from Florida. And she said, “What’d you say your name was?” And I said, “Alice Hopper.” She said, “Alice? We can’t have another Alice. We already have one Alice on this hall.” I’m thinking, I just got here, you know?

And she said, “Alice, how do you like the name Allie?” And I said, “I don’t.” And she said, “What’d you say your last name was?” And I said, “Hopper.” She said, “How about Hoppy?” And I said, “Okay.” From then on, that was my nickname in college. And people still who know me from college call me Hoppy.

Barron Hopper (06:10): Because there was already an Alice there.

Alice Dokter (06:12): There was Alice Barkley already on our hall, so there couldn’t be too many Alices. But I loved being with so many different girls, so many different people to get to know.

Tim Hopper (06:28): We’re shocked to hear that.

Alice Dokter (06:32): And the thing was, we were supposed to have study hours from seven to nine at night, and all you were supposed to be in your room studying during that time. And I never was. There was a hall monitor that should not ever catch you out of your room at the wrong time. So that first weekend, I went downtown on the bus and bought a can of 3-in-1 oil and went and oiled all of the hinges on all of the doors on my hall. Wow. So I could get in and out without the door squeaking.

But I loved King. I had learned about it when I was applying to college by two young missionaries that had just come to the mission field, David and Ellen Ross. And they had actually met at King College. Now, you have to understand, there had been one boy in a graduating class a year or two ahead of us, and that was the only boy that was in our high school, because the other boy, Price Cameron, had gone to Seoul. And so the idea of a coed college was wonderful.

I had known about Agnes Scott because my Aunt Martia went there, and I had known about Queens College, which was where my mother graduated. Right. And I had applied to both those colleges because they were good Presbyterian colleges, but I had never heard of this place that was coed. Such a thought! And so I went to King, sight unseen, and I just fell in love with it. Just the campus, and getting to know the kids, and the different people.

But they had student council or something that were to train us and break us in. And as young freshmen, we had to wear beanies every day that had KC on them, and we had to go every morning and wake up the other dormitories, which meant we had to sing the school song in front of the dormitories at 6:30 in the morning or something like that.

David Hopper (09:10): It was kind of gentle hazing. We were [unclear].

Alice Dokter (09:13): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the guy that was in charge of whatever the court was called was a guy that had been in the military and was now out, and everyone was afraid of him. But you were supposed to learn everybody’s name on campus because at the end of whatever the hazing period was, you would be tested by people walking across the stage, and you were supposed to be able to write down the correct name for them. I don’t remember what my score was, but it was probably pretty high because I had gotten to know a lot of people and continued to get to know people throughout the years. I remember I studied with you. And I just loved King.

So then when Justin went, he was interviewed by somebody from King, and he said, “I had no choice. My mother put banners all over my crib,” which of course was not true. And then Rachel came to me and she said, “Aunt Alice, I just cannot go to King College.” I said, “Honey, you don’t have to.” She said, “All of my brothers and sisters, all of my cousins until now have gone there, and I just cannot do it.” I said, “That’s fine.” So of course she went to ETSU and met Jeremiah there. But I loved King.

Barron Hopper (10:39): Well, going to Presbyterian College, there were about two or three times as many students as at King College. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, that they had fraternities and maybe a sorority there at King, at Presbyterian College. And it took me a while to figure out what they were.

But at Presbyterian College, they immediately had rush, and that rush was when everybody was trying to get into or get you into their fraternity. Okay. Well, it wasn’t for me. I mean, this was ostensibly a Christian college, Presbyterian, but these were primarily kind of party boys from South Carolina, and out for a good time, beer drinking, good old boys. I just wasn’t interested in that, and so I didn’t get into the fraternity thing, and that kind of left me out.

King College was much more uniform, and everybody would kind of mingle more, but Presbyterian College was this sort of thing. So that always left me a little socially isolated. I probably would have been somewhat anyhow, but that was a lot. And I remember they would all clear out and go home on weekends and do their laundry, or maybe their mama would do their laundry for them or something. Well, I didn’t have any mama around to do any laundry for me, and they didn’t have washing machines in the dorms.

So I said, “Well, what am I supposed to do about my laundry?” Somebody said, “Well, what you do is you go down into Clinton. Clinton, and there’s a laundromat. You can get your laundry done.” Well, I didn’t have a car, so I had to walk in there to the laundromat. I carried my laundry down there. And I got there and there were about 15 big Black women in there doing their laundry. I asked one of them to help me. Oh, everybody thought that was hilarious.

Then I said, “Well, what do you do for soap?” And they said, “See that machine over there? It’s got little boxes in it. Well, you put in 15 cents and a box comes out and you’ve got your soap and all.” And they helped me and showed me how the machines worked. They thought that was the greatest thing they had ever seen. So I’d found some friends in Clinton, South Carolina.

Anyhow, I just never got into any sort of angle of social life at Presbyterian College. And I guess I just felt isolated after. My grades were all right. Yeah. Maybe an A or two and Bs and maybe a C or two, but I just didn’t like it that well. Feeling kind of left out, I went up to King College after two years. David was there, he’d been there one year. We roomed together. And I just still felt kind of isolated and left out. Didn’t feel right. I don’t know if I was depressed or what. And that’s when I went in the Army. Oh, wow. Got my ears fixed, you know. Took a few years.

But when a vacation would come, or a long weekend or whatever, you were 200 miles away from Morristown or High Point or Montreat. [unclear]. Where grandparents or friends and all, where you didn’t have a car. So that’s when David and I got in the habit of hitchhiking some. One time I was hitchhiking from Morristown to High Point, from Granddaddy Longenecker to Grandma Hopper, and I got mugged, and that was kind of messy.

But anyhow, it was hard if you didn’t have a car and you were stuck and you didn’t have somebody come pick you up and all. Some of the kids would invite me home for Thanksgiving and stuff like that, and that was nice, but it wasn’t your home. It was kind of foreign, or you couldn’t really just let your hair down. So it was hard.

Tim Hopper (15:05): Dad, you had a story about hitchhiking and found out the person was drinking the whole way, right?

David Hopper (15:11): Hitchhiking and what?

Tim Hopper (15:12): The person, the driver was drinking the whole way, right?

David Hopper (15:14): Oh yeah, hitchhiking back to college. From Asheville to Johnson City, the old, old road was real windy over that ridge.

Barron Hopper (15:27): Now you have that I-26.

David Hopper (15:29): Yeah, now you got 26, but it was an old windy road before 26. And got a ride. Actually, another King kid from Asheville, Quentin Alcorn, and I hitchhiked together. We got over that mountain, all the million curves. Yeah. Got down to the other side of the mountain.

The guy pulled off at a service station and hopped out and bought himself a Mountain Dew out of the drink machine. Went and sat back down in the driver’s seat, pulled out a little bottle of vodka from under the seat, proceeded to pour out half his Mountain Dew and filled it on up the rest of the way with vodka. And I realized that’s what he’d been sipping all the way over the mountain. So we got out the car and hitchhiked our way on. Actually (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (16:27): Was I with you?

David Hopper (16:28): No, it was me and Quentin. And it was a bad, bad place to be hitchhiking. We finally got a ride and went on, but not a busy road or a good spot to be. You learned as a hitchhiker there were places that you could get picked up and there were places you couldn’t get picked up. This was a couldn’t-get-picked-up place. But yeah, that scared me.

I had one other kind of crazy experience. It wasn’t dangerous, but these old country hicks out here on, I guess it was I-40, it had been built then, but this side of Chapel Hill along there. Got picked up in an old clunker, and this guy had these country hicks, he had her get in the back. Yeah. And I got in the front seat with him and we drove along. He was heading down to Statesville or somewhere.

As we drove along, she said, “I gotta pee.” He would, “Ah, you don’t got to.” And they would cuss back and forth. He finally thought, “There’s a plastic bag back there, get that.” You know, this is a crazy ride. I wanted out of that one, but I needed my ride too. But anyway, so there’s some crazy rides.

Barron Hopper (18:06): Yeah, me too.

David Hopper (18:07): But we had some good rides too, you know. I got in with a trucker. It wasn’t a very nice tractor-trailer, but I got in out here somewhere south of Greensboro and rode all the way to Atlanta with the same guy. That’s a great ride.

Barron Hopper (18:27): One time I got in with a man, might have been on I-85 somewhere, but we got to talking a little bit. He said, “Well, would you want to drive?” And I said, “Sure.” So I drove, I don’t know, a couple hundred miles or something for him. I

David Hopper (18:44): think I did. I think I drove for a businessman one time too.

Barron Hopper (18:48): We hitchhiked all the way down to Fort Lauderdale one time.

Alice Dokter (18:53): Yep.

David Hopper (18:54): Yeah,

Barron Hopper (18:55): to visit Alice.

Alice Dokter (18:55): That was the time you ended up saying, you know, the problem with telling lies is you can’t remember what you told last. Because y’all would pick a grandparent, either you are from Montreat or you are from Tennessee. And then the next ride, you might or might not pick the same grandparent. And so it was difficult to remember where it was you said you came from.

Barron Hopper (19:23): Oh, okay.

David Hopper (19:25): Yeah, we got in a ride on that trip with a guy who went really flying down through Florida. Remember how fast he went? I don’t

Barron Hopper (19:34): even remember.

David Hopper (19:35): He was going close to 100 miles down from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale. We made some good time there.

Tim Hopper (19:41): Aunt Margaret, how about your college experience?

Margaret Faircloth (19:45): I did not have a good college experience. I started out at King, where Alice had been so happy, and I thought David had been so happy.

David Hopper (19:54): I was happy there. It just took me a while to break in.

Margaret Faircloth (19:56): When we went to Bristol that day, Daddy took me to the bank to open a checking account, and I got sick. I threw up in the bank. Oh. And so they took me up to the college, and somebody had to help me into the room, and I was out for the rest of the day.

So orientation was starting, and everybody else was getting to know everybody. And I wasn’t even there. Then for the next few days, I just wasn’t feeling good. I didn’t really participate. I think I went to the orientation meetings at some point, but I didn’t really participate. Didn’t get to know people, didn’t make friends. But then everybody kind of had their friends, and I never really felt like I fit in at King.

And so I transferred to Covenant College the next year. Mm-hmm. Where I knew there were Korean missionary kids there and other missionary kids, and I enjoyed that. But then I went to nursing school from there. So transferring college three times is not a good plan.

David Hopper (20:59): Didn’t you have friends killed in a plane crash recently?

Margaret Faircloth (21:01): Yeah, that was just before graduation at nursing school. But I didn’t like nursing school. I probably would have quit, but I had nowhere to go.

Barron Hopper (21:09): You would have quit what?

Margaret Faircloth (21:11): Nursing school. But,

Barron Hopper (21:14): you could have joined the Army.

Margaret Faircloth (21:15): Well, see, I didn’t think of that. Well, actually, no, that’s not true because they were always recruiting nursing students. But then you have to commit to spend kind of your life in the Army.

Barron Hopper (21:26): I was just kidding you.

Margaret Faircloth (21:27): But I didn’t want to do that. But anyway, the whole same thing y’all have described about no place to go on holidays. Mom and Daddy would pay for me to fly to Florida, I think, for Christmas. But I couldn’t hitchhike as a girl, and so I would spend Thanksgivings in the dorm and all of that that was just not pleasant. So I just didn’t like it.

David Hopper (21:50): What I didn’t have in not having my parents in the States, I didn’t have counsel, somebody I could talk to. And I don’t remember ever feeling like I needed great counsel with my folks at home when I was at home. I wasn’t somebody who had big heavy problems to go talk to them about or anything, but I always knew I could bounce things off of them.

But like when I was trying to decide to go to med school, I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what options there were in life. I knew that there were doctors. I knew there were preachers. I knew there were teachers and a few other professions, but I didn’t even know about things like engineering. Yeah.

Barron Hopper (22:35): When you were thinking about chemistry, you had a chemistry professor and all, but I agree with you.

David Hopper (22:42): But chemistry, I really liked math. I liked chemistry, and I did great in chemistry, but it wasn’t because I was real enamored about going into chemistry because I got getting along, I thought, I don’t want to be a chemist, or I don’t want to teach. I don’t want to be in a lab. And I didn’t want to be in the military right then.

Barron Hopper (23:05): You were thinking chemistry and medical school in my presence, and I said, “Well, it just seems like medicine would be better.” I mean, I didn’t know what all was available in chemistry. I see, being near to Eastman Chemical now, man, there’s just all kinds of things people do in chemistry. But somehow medicine seemed better. That was the way I was pointing you. I don’t know if that made any difference to you, but (interrupted).

David Hopper (23:31): Well, yeah, you were at UNC at that point when I went down there and interviewed. You were at Chapel Hill. I went down to Chapel Hill to interview, and so that was good.

Alice Dokter (23:44): When were you at Chapel Hill?

Barron Hopper (23:46): When I came out of the Army.

David Hopper (23:47): He wrote Barron’s Review of Colleges, don’t you know?

Barron Hopper (23:50): From King College I went into the Army. I was in the Army, you know, I went in October in the Army. And then once you’d been in there for as long as I had, once you were down to where there wasn’t that many months left, there wasn’t enough time for you to be sent to Vietnam. You were just kind of twiddling your thumbs. So you can get an early out. I got an early out for a couple of months and came back to UNC.

When you go into the Army, they say, “Well, what state do you want your citizenship to be in? It might make a difference when you come out.” Well, I didn’t have a state that I was really attached to, but naturally I picked North Carolina because of Montreat and grandparents and stuff like that.

So then I came to UNC, and I was always lonely at UNC. I rented a room in the upstairs of a little old lady from the University Presbyterian Church. I really liked her, and there was another chemistry PhD student there, two of us renting. But I was always lonely there. I never had any way to get in socially.

And so I dropped out of UNC and then started into UNC Asheville, probably the fall of ‘73, I guess. Yeah. And by then I had met Martha and was going with Martha, so that gave me a little more stability.

Summer jobs and Montreat

Tim Hopper (25:26): What were summers like during college? Where’d y’all end up?

Alice Dokter (25:31): I worked in Montreat doing (interrupted).

David Hopper (25:34): How many summers did you work there?

Alice Dokter (25:36): Well, let me think. I worked probably two summers, and then the summer before my freshman year, I mean, before my senior year, I went to Korea the year before. One year, I took summer school trying to get ahead in some different classes, because you could take summer classes, and then you wouldn’t have to be as full. That was it, while I was doing practice teaching my senior year. So I worked at Montreat.

Tim Hopper (26:25): For the retreat center?

Alice Dokter (26:27): I’m sorry?

Tim Hopper (26:28): For the retreat center?

Alice Dokter (26:29): At Montreat?

David Hopper (26:30): What was your job?

Alice Dokter (26:31): Oh, I worked in Anderson Auditorium at the information desk, and enjoyed it. There were people around.

Barron Hopper (26:41): When I went to college, sometime in the spring semester, there was a guy recruiting a team to go sell dictionaries out in Missouri. So it was pictured as sure wealth. Well, he was a good salesman, and I went out with the team and I got dropped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I tried that for a while, and I probably made enough money for my upkeep. I didn’t do very well and didn’t like it, so I dropped out and went up to Uncle Peter’s in St. Louis.

And from there I called, you know, you got to be resourceful. I mean, you’re stuck. Mm-hmm. You don’t have a car and you’re stuck out in Missouri. What are you going to do? I called up the Boy Scout Council and got a job at a Boy Scout camp. It was actually an Explorer camp, and they did a lot. They had a lake there, and they did a lot with motorboats. They had three motorboats, and they would pull water skiers.

So most of that summer, I pulled water skiers around and around this lake. It was fun. I got to be really an expert at teaching water skiing. Not that it does you any good in the rest of your life, but I could get these kids up and going really quick, and they would enjoy. By the time they had been there four or five days, they were stacking up on each other’s shoulders and stuff like that. So that was fun.

Alice Dokter (28:18): Well, could you water ski?

Barron Hopper (28:20): Well, I could if I wanted. I wasn’t that interested, but

David Hopper (28:25): could you drive a boat well?

Barron Hopper (28:27): I was an expert boat driver. I mean, I could drive that boat. It took a while, but you were doing eight hours a day or something where you could pull right up to the dock and it would just glide right up against that dock. I was good.

Then one day I was pulling out from the dock, and the waterfront guy, his name was Kim, he called out to me. He was trying to get my attention for something or other, and I cut my engine off. Of course, your boat doesn’t stop when you cut your engine off. And I was trying to talk to him, and the boat glided into, there was some kind of a thing there with concrete buttress coming out from it, and I glided into it and broke the windshield on the boat.

Well, I didn’t know about this, but when I went to leave, I was supposed to get paid $175 for the summer, for six weeks or eight weeks. I still remember the guy to this day. He was a Jewish guy, Mel Lowenstein, and he said, “Well, now we’ve got to take this windshield off your boat.” And I said, “Listen,” I argued with him. I said, “Listen, I was doing my job.” Some of the guys would go running around and hit their boats on stumps and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Well, I wasn’t doing anything. I was just talking to the lifeguard who had called to me, and I made him give me my money.

It wasn’t much money anyhow, but there again, you didn’t have a place to live, and you had lived there and been fed, and you had a place to stay and everything.

Margaret Faircloth (30:03): But you did get your money back?

Barron Hopper (30:05): Yeah, I got the money. And

David Hopper (30:07): how’d you get back to Montreat or get back east?

Barron Hopper (30:10): I took a bus. Probably spent a good bit of that money getting back. Or maybe I (interrupted). I don’t think I hitchhiked. I think I rode a bus.

Tim Hopper (30:17): Who’s Uncle Peter? Is that your great uncle?

Barron Hopper (30:19): He was Ruth Longenecker’s uncle. He was Grandma Dot’s uncle.

Tim Hopper (30:24): Okay.

Barron Hopper (30:24): He was a bachelor uncle, he had a little farm outside of St. Louis. And we had met him. We knew him over the years. Grandma Ruth had lived in the same area with him, and she had kind of watched out for him for years.

David Hopper (30:42): He was an old bachelor.

Barron Hopper (30:43): An old bachelor. And in fact, that was probably the biggest question when she married Granddaddy Longenecker. What was going to happen to Uncle Peter? Well, actually, what happened was he died. Well, it wasn’t right away.

David Hopper (30:59): That solved the problem.

Barron Hopper (31:02): After some period of time, he fell down in his garage and just died. There wasn’t anybody to help him. He was an older guy, but he raised pigs while we knew him.

I remember when I went to visit Uncle Peter at that time, he had a chair in his bedroom, and the one thing he wanted to help with, he had this huge mound of newspapers by it, and he wanted to get them out and burn them. He would sit there every day and read the newspaper and drop it there until it was a big huge mound. And in the living room, he had these stacked books about this high all around with trails through them.

Margaret Faircloth (31:42): A hoarder.

Barron Hopper (31:43): He hoarded books. And anyhow,

Tim Hopper (31:47): Dad, you spent some summers working in Montreat as well, right?

David Hopper (31:50): Yeah, we came back in ‘68, and I guess I just kind of goofed off that summer. Then summer of ‘69, I got a job with the world missions of the Presbyterian, it was PCUSA, PCUS back then, I guess. I worked in the World Mission building, which they changed the name of that year to The Way Out, which still has the sign The Way Out outside of it. It’s that building right to the, as you face the lake from below it, it’s just to the right of it.

But I was the flunky there, but I kind of ran the building. I kept it clean and straight and did fix it and met people. And I got to know a lot of the mission leadership of the Presbyterian denomination that summer. Some I liked, some I didn’t like. And (interrupted).

Barron Hopper (33:12): You stayed with me in my place.

David Hopper (33:14): Yeah, you were up in the campground that summer, weren’t you? Yeah. And we stayed in the campground.

Barron Hopper (33:20): I had a tent to live in and he came and lived with me. But the one thing I will never forget was I was not there when Dr. Nelson Bell came by to recruit me to put his Presbyterian Outlook or something (interrupted).

David Hopper (33:37): Presbyterian Journals.

Barron Hopper (33:38): Around Montreat.

David Hopper (33:40): Is that how I got the job?

Barron Hopper (33:41): And David was there, so he gave the job to David. Oh, that’s why David is wealthy and I’m poor.

David Hopper (33:48): I didn’t get paid big bucks, but he paid me. So this is my second job that summer, was putting stacks of the Presbyterian Journal around Montreat. Now the denomination was becoming more liberal, and Montreat had lots of libs who didn’t like what the Presbyterian Journal said.

And so I would go around every day and fish them out, fish the whole stack out of Anderson Auditorium lobby that had gone into the trash can. I’d fish them out of the trash can and put them back up on the shelves, this kind of stuff. Had a stack there and a stack up there.

Margaret Faircloth (34:28): Did he ask you to do that? Was that part of your job?

David Hopper (34:31): Well, to check on making sure that piles of them were staying around. And I found out that why the piles were disappearing sometimes was not because people had picked up the copies, but because people had chucked the copies. Wow. So that was my job for Dr. Bell.

He and I got to know each other some. We’d go to baseball games over to, he had his box seats over at the Asheville Tourists. Tourists, and go over there. He had been a ballplayer and everybody knew he knew the game, and everybody’d come talk to Dr. Bell.

The next summer I worked in Assembly Inn, the big hotel there in Montreat by the lake, and I ran the elevator. I talked about him being a good boat driver. I was a good elevator driver. The elevator didn’t have automatic level, and so you had to stop it just right. You had to flip the switch to stop it when it was about a foot from the floor.

Margaret Faircloth (35:33): It had that dial thing.

David Hopper (35:34): Yeah, and it would coast after you turned it off, so you had to stop it to have it level, otherwise the old ladies would trip.

Tim Hopper (35:43): The elevator only moved two directions though. A boat moved four directions. Yeah,

David Hopper (35:47): That’s right. Anyway, and so Bill Brown and I worked there. He worked mostly at the desk, and I occasionally worked the desk, sleep behind the desk at night.

Barron Hopper (36:00): Billy Graham was there with you?

David Hopper (36:02): Yeah.

I was a bellhopper, but I’d deliver soft drinks into conference rooms sometimes. The early people meeting to talk about forming the PCA and pulling out of the denomination and all, some would meet in the conference room down the back hall.

Barron Hopper (36:35): Really?

David Hopper (36:36): And I didn’t know that. I would linger longer when I delivered Cokes into them or something. I would stand there and listen in on the conversation. So I kind of heard some of the stuff that was coming up.

Barron Hopper (36:49): Well, do you remember any of the people at that point?

David Hopper (36:53): I’m sure I once upon a time knew the names of some of them. I don’t remember the names of them. So my second and third year, I guess, I worked there. Yeah, so I worked three summers in Montreat.

One summer, Bill and I stayed most of the summer, and the Browns were going to be coming home and they were going to stay in the Graham house, and it was open. So we stayed in the Graham house, just Bill and me, for a good stretch. Yeah. The

Alice Dokter (37:27): one on Mississippi Road.

David Hopper (37:28): Well, at the corner of Mississippi. That was a nice abode to own.

Watching a moonwalk with Billy Graham

Tim Hopper (37:34): Can you share the story about the Apollo mission?

David Hopper (37:38): After church one Sunday, maybe it was in the summertime. Anyway, no, it was when conferences were not in session. I’d gone to church in Gaither, and Ruth Graham was sitting behind us or in front of us or something. Invited me and I think it was Pete Robinson and his friend Tex up for lunch.

I didn’t know Billy was going to be there. He would sometimes come to church late, or he’d sneak in and go up into the balcony and sneak back out before it was over so he wouldn’t get cornered. But

Barron Hopper (38:19): wouldn’t get cornered?

David Hopper (38:20): Everybody would, he’d get cornered. Everybody would want to talk to him, so he would try and come into church and get out of church.

Unidentified speaker (38:28): Oh, okay.

David Hopper (38:28): Before, you know, late and early.

But so we went up to the Grahams’ house, and it was just Pete and his friend and me and Ruth and Billy, and we had lunch. I remember it’s the first time I’d ever seen a microwave. That was when microwaves were just being advertised, and Anita Bryant was advertising them. I had taken her bags into the hotel once, but she was friends of the Grahams and had given them a microwave.

After lunch, we went into the den, not their main living room, but kind of a den room that had a TV, a color TV. Ruth wandered on off in the house, and Billy and Ruth, I’m sorry, Billy and me and the two other guys sat there and watched a moonwalk all afternoon. Billy told me that John Chancellor had called him up a few days earlier and asked him if he would come down to narrate the launch with him, and he declined it.

No, but we really enjoyed talking to him because he knew everybody. Probably very few people in the world that could have picked up the phone and called Khrushchev or whoever, and they’d have taken it, or called the Pope, and they’d have taken his call. But that was a good time, a good conversation.

Tim Hopper (40:20): Do you remember which Apollo it was?

David Hopper (40:22): No, I figured it out. I found the date. I figured out the date. But anyway, I’ll find it for you. It’s in a letter. Anyhow, I enjoyed that. I’ve met Billy Graham several times at some other things. I met him at Mrs. Bell’s funeral. I met him at (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (40:45): He came to Daddy’s funeral.

David Hopper (40:47): Daddy’s funeral. I met him, and he came into the hospital. Barron and I had a good long visit with the Grahams when he came to the hospital, when they came to the hospital to visit Daddy. You weren’t there, were you?

Alice Dokter (40:59): No.

David Hopper (40:59): Just the two of us. Those were my two good visits, was when Daddy was in the hospital and there. But it’s kind of neat to have known him a little bit.

Holidays and family losses

Tim Hopper (41:14): Any more college-era stories before we wrap up and have a little bit of reflection?

David Hopper (41:18): Vacations were hard for me in college, just like Barron said. I could go down to Morristown sometimes and stay there, but I didn’t last very long with the Longenecker grandparents. Burned me out being there, and to come to the Presbyterian Home in High Point, it was good to visit Grandma briefly but not to stay there for long.

But two things. One was I went down to Montreat once, one Christmastime.

Barron Hopper (41:57): And where’d you stay?

David Hopper (41:59): At the house. I opened it up and stayed in there. Didn’t have anybody, didn’t know anybody. I mean, I knew people, but I didn’t have any Christmas, no mail had gotten to me from home. I had zero presents. You guys were both overseas.

Barron Hopper (42:21): Was the house opened up?

David Hopper (42:24): No, I opened it up. I don’t remember whether that time I, sometimes I would go there and just sleep in the house and have a lamp and go pee in the backyard and things like that. I don’t remember on that year. No. But so that was hard.

And the other hard experience was when y’all were overseas, Granddaddy Hopper died. I got a call at King to go (interrupted). I’m talking too much, maybe. Grandma had called that Granddaddy had died. You know, it was hard to call back then. I didn’t even call. I just checked, got a plane. There was a plane going to be leaving. I had a friend take me out to Tri-Cities Airport, caught a plane, flew over.

Unidentified speaker (43:15): To Korea?

David Hopper (43:16): To Greensboro High Point Airport, hitchhiked over to Grandma’s, and came in there, and she was still waiting to hear back from me.

Barron Hopper (43:27): Um.

David Hopper (43:28): and

Barron Hopper (43:30): I was traveling to Korea.

David Hopper (43:31): You were on your way to Korea. Alice was in Korea.

Alice Dokter (43:34): I was in Korea when Daddy got the phone call that Sunday morning. And Mama said, “Joe, you don’t have to go preach,” because he was scheduled to go preach at the missile base. And he said, “No, Dot, I signed up for it.” And so he went and preached.

David Hopper (43:54): I think I called him.

Alice Dokter (43:55): Oh, okay.

David Hopper (43:57): Anyway, the Browns were overseas, and Uncle George and Aunt Vodie, they were probably in New Orleans. They were in New Orleans. They got in the car to start driving up here, and Billy was in Memphis and he flew in. But I was there. I took Grandma to the

Alice Dokter (44:22): funeral

David Hopper (44:23): home. I walked into this funeral home. I never had been around any American funerals. Walked in the funeral home and Grandma was still out in the car, I think. I think I was gonna go out and get her. There’s nobody in the front lobby and all. And I walked by, there’s an open casket. They were fixing to have a service. There’s an open casket there. This grossed me out a little bit.

I went on in the back and found somebody, then went in there with Grandma and took us in and showed us all these caskets to look at. I just felt like a bunch of charlatans ripping her off. It just seemed like a huge amount of money just to put in the ground. And anyway, that was a tough day. I was so happy when Uncle George got there, middle of the night. And Bill came a little later, he flew in that afternoon. Yeah, those were tough times. So it wasn’t always easy being a kid in America.

Joe and Dot’s legacy

Tim Hopper (45:23): Does anybody want to attempt to kind of summarize your parents’ impact and their work? They were in Korea for 38 years.

Barron Hopper (45:33): Well, one thing I would say about it and about the Korea missionaries, you see so many cynical things nowadays about Christians or Christian workers or something, and my parents, they were steady. It seemed to me like they were faithful doing what they were supposed to do, and so were the whole mission there in Korea. You had, I don’t know how many people, 50 people or something, and they weren’t getting into any mischief or doing anything wrong. They were faithful workers for the church. And guess what? The church did well.

David Hopper (46:06): And they were a big part of being world changers in Korea. They really (interrupted).

Alice Dokter (46:13): Well, today when I meet, and I like to go to Asians and I like to see if they’re from Korea, and to a person, it doesn’t matter if they are Christians or if they are not Christians, whenever I identify myself with the history in Korea of parents and grandparents, they thank me profusely for what missionaries did for their country.

Now, of course, those that are Christians thank me that they know they’re going to heaven, thank me that they have the Bible. But those that are non-Christians thank me because it was missionaries that brought in schools and hospitals and printed materials.

Barron Hopper (47:05): Colleges and universities.

Alice Dokter (47:06): And colleges and high schools. And I’m convinced that part of the reason that they have the democratic type of government that they have is because Presbyterianism teaches voting for your leaders and then submitting to them and not having a pope to [unclear] things, but to have it sort of spaced out, we the people.

And I think that the gospel has changed Korea in raising the status of women. Mm-hmm. It didn’t set out to do that, but just by its very nature, it has stabilized marriages, it promoted education, and it provided the written word, the Scripture word.

Barron Hopper (48:04): And they were just a good example for the people, just a good example of life lived. You had these mission stations with these people. They were doing things in the community. They were just people in the community. They were participating in churches and hospitals and schools.

Alice Dokter (48:21): And being fun. This idea of the drab missionary is nothing that I can identify with.

David Hopper (48:28): And they never tooted their own horns, never tooted their own horns. Daddy was recognized with a DD from Davidson College. And Mama was recognized for being the Alumnus of the Year from Queens College. They

Margaret Faircloth (48:53): never used that.

David Hopper (48:54): They did receive some worldly recognition along the way, but that was never a big deal to them. They didn’t seek their own glory, and I think they, and there are others too, but they were as successful in the work of missions in Korea as anybody. And may not go down in history with a name known as being the great missionaries there, but were as great as any of them.

Barron Hopper (49:30): Faithful, patient workers. Now, if you went in Daddy’s study in Montreat, on the back of the door inside was his honorary doctorate from the Soggye Po University. And what was his doctorate in? I don’t remember, but at mission meetings they would humorously give out these doctorates.

David Hopper (49:54): And he had this university with no campus, no students, only alumni. That was A.B.

Margaret Faircloth (50:00): Robinson Ajax University.

Barron Hopper (50:03): So my father didn’t have his honorary doctorate from Davidson College there, he had his doctorate from Sogipo University.

David Hopper (50:15): Ajax University on Sogipo.

Barron Hopper (50:16): Yeah, Ajax University. In other words, they didn’t (interrupted).

David Hopper (50:21): And when he finished, when he was graduated from missions, when he was given that final ceremony there in Montreat, I don’t have it, but apparently on the bulletin or whatever, the people that were retiring from missions had all their credentials. Daddy listed a degree from Ajax University.

Barron Hopper (50:47): Well, you know some of the Robinsons. When R. K. Robinson died, they buried him up on Billy Graham’s property. I went to that burial, and Rob Robinson had made a big banner and laid it across his casket, and it said, “Ajax approved.” And I’m sure Billy Graham’s men who were doing the work, I’m sure they were thinking, hmm.

Alice Dokter (51:15): Well, it horrified Calvin Thielman, or whoever it was that got up there first. “This is not good.” And they said, “Oh yes it is, it is exactly perfect.”

Barron Hopper (51:28): In other words, it was just a silly thing that they did and didn’t make too much show of themselves or take themselves too seriously.

Margaret Faircloth (51:37): And their goal was to raise up Koreans as mature Christians, not to control the Korean church or maintain that leadership into perpetuity. They did their job, they trained up leaders, and they left.

Barron Hopper (51:53): You have Michener’s book about Hawaii, and those missionaries went in there and got all rich, and that wasn’t the way it was in Korea.

Reflections on growing up in Korea

Tim Hopper (52:03): Any reflections on your own lives and the impact on, you know, not just being missionary kids but growing up in Korea and seeing the world in a different way, how that’s impacted you?

Alice Dokter (52:16): More open to internationals or people that have traveled than to people that are very, very local. I guess it’s a bigger mind. Mama used to say she liked to meet people that had been working in other areas of the world because they were all areas of the Lord’s vineyards and different parts of the vineyards. And that is of interest to me, hmm, meeting servants of the Lord that work in other places because God is so diverse in his appointment of people to do specific and nonspecific jobs.

Tim Hopper (52:59): Points to me, having tried to read everything I can on this, just the remarkable courage of all four of your grandparents having come from rural Kentucky, rural South Carolina, rural Missouri, rural Pennsylvania, and families that have been in those areas for a long time. And the courage that they had, I guess, over 100 years ago now, to get on ships and go to faraway places, which I’m sure they had reasonable consideration they might never return from. And just the faith that they had.

Barron Hopper (53:33): And raising your kids there was a huge bit of faith. But somehow people survived, got what they were out for.

David Hopper (53:41): They didn’t Google what they were getting into.

Barron Hopper (53:46): Well, I think for us it was a good upbringing. We had a loving family and community. The Koreans loved us and we were safe and it was diverse. It wasn’t all one type of people trying to stay the same or something.

Alice Dokter (54:04): And we have a very large family because of it, because the missionary aunts and uncles in some instances were closer to us than our blood relatives that had not lived and grown up in that country.

David Hopper (54:19): But somehow our Hopper family, the four of us and our parents and our offspring, have grown up and have stayed as a family unit.

Barron Hopper (54:31): Right.

David Hopper (54:31): Yeah. That was a good result of our upbringing. How much of that had to do with growing up in Korea or what, I don’t know, but I don’t think it harmed us. I’m sure there are some things that could have happened better, but I don’t have any regrets from growing up in Korea.

And as far as how it’s reflected on my life now, certainly being raised international, I’m very comfortable with the world. I’ve become more comfortable with doing things, medical trips and all. Yeah. I don’t really mind stepping into another culture and being fed something that doesn’t look right and various things.

Tim Hopper (55:22): We don’t have hours to talk about all the things you’ve been fed that don’t look right. Yeah.

David Hopper (55:26): But no, I appreciate our background and I appreciate having the extended family I have. My siblings and their families.

Margaret Faircloth (55:37): And all of our children are walking with the Lord, which is really amazing.