Willard Reese Phillips

PI: KW85-WZQ

Birth: 13 Jul 1935 - Caliente, Lincoln, Nevada

Death: 2 Jul 2005 - Washington, Utah

Burial: Washington, Utah

Father: Reese Taylor (Biological) & Alvin LaVon Phillips (Adopted & Sealed)

Mother: Bernice Simkins

Siblings -

Yes

Spouse: Yes

Marriage: 7 Jun 1955

Children -

Yes

Memories of  {add your own memories}

Describe what he looked like

• Average height, stocky, round. Dark hair. -Teri

Describe his personality

• Very stern, serious most of the time. Knowledgeable. Spoke his mind. Liked horses and being a cowboy. Liked football, especially the 49ers.  He told me that he loved numbers and was always messing with them. Had financial rules that he followed and always, always talked about money and saving it. -Teri

What was something you learned from him

• Not math! ...even though he said that I wasn't leaving this desk till I knew what I was doing. -Teri

What comes to mind when you think of him

• First off, when we lived in Texas back in the 80s he and Mema came to visit and slept out on the sofa sleeper. I had heard that he stepped on a nail and I wanted to see. One morning I got up before anyone else and tiptoed into the living room to get a look at this and luckily his foot was sticking out of the covers. I went right up to it and looked at the bottom and I didn't see any wound.  I then remember thinking that maybe it was his other foot, but it was under the covers, so I went back to bed. Never got to see it. He was always into doing family history and temple work. He wrote a personal history over the course of a few years. (I have it somewhere and will get it posted.) Sometimes he would say things that I didn't agree with and had cold feelings towards certain people. There were a lot of people that respected him like nobody's business. He did accomplish a lot in his life. He was a fan of the flat top haircut. -Teri

The following is paper that was written for a college class by John entitled: Willard Phillips Oral History
Until I was six year old we lived over in Barkley Nevada on a ranch with our grandparents, my grandfather, two uncles, an aunt, and my mother. This was an old time cattle ranch type of thing. There were two other families that lived in that area. I remember the cattle aspects of it. The guy’s cowboying and going out to camp it was very interesting to me. Of course I was too small to actively participate with the horses and those kinds of things. Then just before I was six years old, my mother remarried again.

Then we moved to Panaca, that was a fun time. Panaca was a little, home type of town with shade trees, and ditches running down each street. In both of these places we initially had no running water in the house, no inside toilets, or none of that. I remember bathing Saturday night in one of those little round tubs. Half the time it was relatively care free. I remember the beginning of the Second World War, 1941. My sister was born on that day, December 7th, 1941. I remember the strong spirit of nationalism that I felt, as we heard about the people in military from our little town. A lot of them didn’t come back unfortunately. I was six when the war ended in ’45, I believe, and I remember when that happened. We were running around as kids there and boy, we thought that was just great, the war was over. I remember the feelings that I had at that time was that a person should be in the military, and I thought that was the noblest thing for a person to be in the military. People came home on leave and would wear their uniforms, and I thought that was just wonderful.

One time, I remember getting home late and getting up early for the farm and having to do things. I didn’t feel like it and my dad said, “If you’re going to dance, you have to pay the fiddler.” In other words, be responsible for your actions, and everything has a price. I got out of high school however, and we were kind of poor people, there was no money, no nothing to do anything. I didn’t think I could be in the military. Especially to be a pilot, because to be a pilot in the air force, which is what I wanted to do, you had to have a college degree. I had no money and I didn’t think I could go; no capability to go. So I just go a job and went to work. My biological father came up to my high school graduation and I went back to California with him, worked that summer, came back, and stayed at home for a little while.

I got a job on a road construction thing and then the next spring, which would have been in 1954, I finally made the break and went to Henderson Nevada. I got a job and just thought that would be life. Met your grandmother down there and got married in ‘55. Happy times, everything was wonderful, and then had a situation in ’57. All at once I was offered a supervising position at the plant, and the man that offered that position was very kind. He said “I think you have more potential then this, and this is the highest position you’ll ever have at this plant without a college education.” I thought gee, that age and not ever having another promotion; it looked gloom.

I got a call to go for my army physical about that same time, and also about that same time there was a person who just separated from the air force out in Nellis, who was a pilot. He said you could still go into pilot training until you were 26 ½ years old. So, if I went into school right then and graduated in four years I would make it.

We went up to BYU in 1957. It was $80 a quarter, so it cost $240 a year for tuition. I was a Cadet Commander in the ROTC my senior year. I went on to Selma Alabama for pilot training, and it was like a foreign country for us. They spoke a different language, it seemed. That was a really tough year. It was thirteen months of very aggressive academic instruction as well as flying instruction. We got out of there, and then we went to Tennessee and learned to fly the C130, I thought. I got checked out in the C130, but I didn’t learn to fly it till I got more experience. The C130 had a tremendous amount of power, in fact it was over-powered, and it was a really fine airplane. We dropped troops, tanks, guns, supplies, and stuff like that. . In the C130 I went east to New Deli India, west to Thailand, got down to the Panama Canal, places in North Africa, almost all the way around the world. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.

Probably the really tender memory I have was when I got my first crew. I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. We went to Okinawa, and I went over as a co-pilot with Major Cox. The person who was going to be the operations manager had to go back for a family emergency, and so Major Cox then became the operations manager and they gave me a crew. We flew missions then out of Naha Air Force base in Okinawa to Vietnam. In about October of ’65, they were going to move a wing of C130’s, three squadrons, over to close to the Vietnam area. And it looked like it was either go then or go later, so I volunteered to go then. I was over there the rest of ‘65 and then came back in December of ’66. We went to Vietnam a whole bunch and flew a lot, and then during that time I was upgraded to be an instructor, which is a level above aircraft commander. So we did some parish re-supply, dropping stuff to army units. Up there they just gave us a coordinance to drop the stuff, and we would go drop the stuff. I hoped it got to ‘em, and I assumed it did. Just dropped it in the jungle and there it was.

We were lucky; we lost two C130’s in our squadron, two out of sixteen. You always feel bad, but you press on. That’s war; you expect to lose a few. One actually ran into a hill down there. We had gone out the night before going from “Notrang” up to “Tuiwong”, and I took off with five airplanes and I got up there and I said, “Ok turn on the runway lights and well land.” And they said, “We don’t have any runway lights.” I told the other four to go back to “Notrang”. We were hauling fuel for the army, and I had been in that runway several times, so I told them to park two jeeps, facing each other, at the end of the runway so I would see where the end of the runway was. They put the lights on and of course the navigator could see the runway on the radar and so forth. So, we just went ahead and landed, obviously illegally, but we figured the army needed there fuel. Then I went back to Taiwan the next day and the set that mission up again. That night was when they ran into the hill.

The most concerned I was, was when we took off out of Sigone and it was really heavy. It was a hot day in the afternoon, of course the higher the temperature the more runway it takes, the harder it is to fly. We were lumbering along over those rice patties trying to get enough altitude to pull the gear up. I was afraid to change anything. We were just staggering, and that poor old thing was really loaded. All of the sudden just “Bang!” A huge, big loud noise just hit right by my feet up there in the front on the outside of the aircraft. I thought, man we’ve been hit. It was a bird! Yep it was a bird.

When we got back from Vietnam that first time to, I went to TAC headquarters. From there, had a one year assignment as an ROTC instructor at Wichita State University. From there we went to Cannon Air Force base where I was the transportation squadrant commander. Then my eyes quit me and I couldn’t fly anymore and, so that’s when I decided retirement. After I got out I was really going to retire, did nothing for a while, then I really got bored. When I retired from the air force I was forty seven years old and that was way too young to retire. So Dr. Mathews, who was a good friend in the school situation, gave me a job at the school, so I did that for eleven years. At that time I was sixty and ready to retire. So I did.

Just been slumming since then. Worked at Yellowstone for a year, then I worked two years part time at the school district. Since then we haven’t done anything! All we do now is just go to church!

The following is another paper written by John entitled: Grandpa 
Everyday I would peddle my bright blue mountain bike to grandpa’s banana yellow house. I knew that once I got inside there would always be treats and goodies waiting. I would pull up to the sidewalk (always going way too fast), slam on the brakes, and jump off in the middle of stopping. I knew exactly where Grandpa was.

Everyday I could hear the TV in the den, because the window would always be cracked open to get that nice cross breeze. Sports commentators would be discussing the football game. I would go inside and there was grandpa. In his late 50’s, he would be sitting there, leaned back, legs crossed, and his hands joined, resting on his grandpa belly. Almost everyday he wore kaki pants with a striped polo shirt shirt. He isn’t the tallest guy, about 5’9”. His gray hair would be combed to the side.

He didn’t have any favorite teams; he would just flip through all the games, usually watching the most interesting. As I look back at it now, I think he would watch and reflect on his own glory days of football. I would always go in and sit at his desk. The chair was really big and made me look even smaller than I was! He would greet me with a welcoming, “Hey John Boy!” He saw me everyday, but always had the same excitement when I would come over. That always made me feel nice and warm inside. The first thing he would always ask me was, “How have ya been?” Normally I would answer, “Oh, pretty good.” Some days I would have something more to say, but usually it was the same old thing. We would watch the game for a little bit, and then we would go into the living room and sit in the, well broke-in, rockers. Grandma would find and join us. The rockers were arranged in a triangle pattern. They were all different shades of brown, along with the rest of the house. I knew what was coming, yet I had that anticipation. He was in the air force and been to college, so he knew what he was talking about. Everyday he would give me advice about something new. Mostly it was about my future. Being a young teenager, I needed all the help I could get. So, we would sit in his living room for about and hour or so. On the cold winter days the fire would be burning. I could sense the calming glow of the coals, and the popping of the wood. He talked to me about college, my mission, and mostly about money. He learned the importance of saving money when he was young so naturally he would tell me everything he knew about it. Being retired, he made and good salary, but he didn’t have a big house, or a big anything! You just need to be satisfied with the simple things of life.

Every summer we would take care of the garden. He would show me the proper techniques of gardening. As we would be out in the garden, there would always be something in the corner of my eye, the barn. It was a huge dark brown wooden barn. It was just about the oldest thing in our small town. On the south side wall there was a big opening to load all the hay in. Grandpa was an old time cowboy, so he had the whole setup. Fields, horses, wagons, and the barn full of hay. Knowing that I really enjoyed going there, he would take me. There were two sections of corn, and right down the middle was the dirt path that led straight to the barn. I could smell all the hay and manure and man, was it good. The five horses hung out there, especially when we would feed them. Grandpa would always let me feed them. He would get out the pitch fork and let me go at it. There were plenty of chances for me to stab myself, but good ole gramps just let me have my fun. That’s how Grandpa was with everything, just go with the flow. Now that I look back, I’m surprised I wasn’t the recipient any major injuries.

It was the best when he would saddle them horses up, and go for a little ride. I felt invincible on those horses. Most people wouldn’t think much more about that, other than going for a nice little ride, but it meant a lot more to me. All those times he would let me just do my thing, even if it was not the best way, I didn’t feel like a little boy just feeding the horses or playing up on the hay bails. I felt like I was important and grandpa could trust me, just like his regular helpers. Of course I didn’t do that much work, but I felt like I did. I have learned a lot from my grandpa. Now days, he doesn’t seem to be easily bothered by much. I see that in myself a lot. He taught me that you don’t have to be the biggest most sought after guy, just be you.

I can remember one summer afternoon. It was your typical bright and sunny day, and he let me get up on a horse. It was a pretty white, actually a dirty white from all the rolling around in the dirt, horse. I was steering that ole girl around and she started to get a little rowdy. I yelled, “Grandpa!” He didn’t come, and told me that I could handle it. Even though I could have been hurt, he hade faith in me and told me I could do it. Everything turned out ok. I have remember that my whole life. When life gets hard, I stop and think, “I can do it.”

In some ways I consider myself a cowboy, thanks to my grandpa. He was always willing to go the extra mile, even if it was inconvenient for him. He has left a great legacy, and I am proud to have been a part of it. I hope that when I’m a grandpa, my grandkids will be able to know my grandpa through me, and they will be as proud of me as I am of my grandpa!