INTERESTING TIMES: Our recent mention of Civilian Conservation Corps camps on the Allegheny National Forest in the 1930s and early 1940s prompted Dick Thomas to share some of his recollections of prisoner of war camps in the vicinity during and shortly after World War II.

Some of the CCC camps that were unused after that program ended in 1942 found a fresh purpose in housing German POWs war during World War II.

Dick recalls that he was 10- or 11-years-old around 1945 or 1946 when a POW crew worked to log an area near his family’s home in Irishtown, along Big Shanty Road near Tainer Springs.

The crew of about a dozen men would arrive in a truck under the guard of two men armed with shotguns.

The POWs must not have been much of a threat, Dick recalled, because sometimes the guards never left the truck.  

“They pretty much trusted them,”  Dick said.

The POWs logged with axes and large crosscut saws, and during their lunch breaks would sometimes wander over to his house and play ball with the kids in the area.

“Some of the prisoners learned some English,” Dick said, but others conversed only in their native tongue.

“Interesting times,” Dick mused.

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MORE INFLATION: Darell D. Harris, a retired minister who lives in Oswayo, passed along a couple of his recollections about hospital costs from the 1940s, when he was a youngster.

“My father, Carl Harris, fell 40 feet from an oil derrick in 1941. He spent 10 days in the Olean General Hospital in a private room. According to my mother’s diary, the bill for the hospital was $95.60; the doctor bill was $50,” he wrote.

He also remembers a hospital experience from just a few years later, 1944 or ’45 he believes, when his sister broke her wrist while roller skating and was taken to the emergency room at Olean General. 

“After treatment and x-rays, she was discharged two hours later,” he wrote.  The x-rays and doctor bill was $62 — which my father thought was highway robbery!”