George Wiswell was born in July 1926 in Arlington, Massachusetts. He grew up in Winchester [Annotator's Note: Winchester, Massachusetts]. It was a wonderful rural community. His father commuted to Boston [Annotator's Note: Boston, Massachusetts]. He attended public schools. His father founded an advertising agency, Chambers and Wiswell. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Wiswell how the Great Depression affected them.] They were penny pinchers. His family was comfortable. He had one younger brother. His grade school was one block away. His father enlisted to fly with the Canadian Air Force in World War 1. He learned to fly near the Texas border and was good at aerial gunnery but never flew after he left the service. Wiswell loved flying and flew a lot. Wiswell had to really peel stories out of his father and learned more from his wife's father who had been in the trenches in France. The coming war was discussed in school. Wiswell enlisted in the Navy in 1943. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Wiswell what his reaction was to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941.] He heard the news with his family on the car radio. His father became active in helping the war effort with his advertising business. Wiswell had learned to fly illegally. He saw a Piper Cub [Annotator's Note: Piper J-3 Cub light observation aircraft] at a farm one day. The farmer that owned it taught Wiswell to fly. Paul Collins was a friend of his father's. He was an airmail pilot. Wiswell's father helped Collins, Amelia Earhart [Annotator's Note: Amelia Earhart; American aviation pioneer], and Eugene Vidal found Boston Airways [Annotator's Note: Boston-Maine Airways, 20 July 1931] which ultimately became part of Delta [Annotator's Note: Delta Air Lines, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia]. Collins learned of Wiswell's illegal flying and convinced him to get proper training. Wiswell was flying one day when a Constellation [Annotator's Note: Lockheed Constellation four-engine airliner] flew over him and flipped him upside down. Learning to fly properly saved his life.

George Wiswell enlisted in the Navy because he wanted to fly and go to war. He and his friends discussed it. The kids ahead of him in school were already in the battle zones. He enlisted and went to Williams College [Annotator's Note: in Williamstown, Massachusetts] for a semester. He flunked out. He did not want to spend the time there and he wanted to do something. He went to Great Lakes [Annotator's Note: Naval Station Great Lakes in Great Lakes, Illinois] for a short time, followed by PT-Boat [Annotator's Note: Patrol Torpedo Boat] training in Melville, Rhode Island [Annotator's Note: Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island]. At Great Lakes, he attended boot camp. It got very cold. They learned discipline. He attended a gunner's mate training program and learned to work metal. The PT-Boat program was abandoned, and he was assigned to the repair ship USS Vulcan (AR-5) as a gunner's mate. He made sure the armaments were in functioning order. Wiswell got on the Vulcan and it went to Norfolk [Annotator's Note: Norfolk Naval Shipyard, also called Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia] because the ship needed repairs. It went through the typhoon in the Pacific at the end of the war [Annotator's Note: Typhoon Louise, 9 October 1945]. More repairs were done in Brooklyn [Annotator's Note: Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York, New York]. He then went to Casco, Maine. In Norfolk, Wiswell worked on the armament and did underwater repair.

George Wiswell learned how to dive in the Navy. Wiswell was given a sheet of commands for line pulls under water as communication to memorize. The standard Navy Mark Five diving rig [Annotator's Note: United States Navy Mk V diving rig] weighed about 250 pounds. They would be lowered into the water. The whole thing is very cumbersome and made working in it hard. He was sent down with a jet hose under the mud in the seabed counting the links in the anchor chain. It was very different, but he had always enjoyed being in and on the water. Getting used to the equipment was the hardest part. Scuba was easier but there is less protection. It would take close to 30 minutes to get the gear on. There are number of things he did that he would not do again. 30 or 40 years ago, a good friend of his was going to buy a luxury motor yacht. The friend knew of a ship that sank and wanted Wiswell to get it for him. [Annotator's Note: Wiswell goes into detail about how the ship sank.] Wiswell's task was how to raise the boat. He used barges and winches. Chains had to be placed under the vessel. It was the scariest thing he has ever done. They got the boat up. They refurbished it and got a nice vessel.

George Wiswell was made a third-class diver in the Navy. Most repair jobs are figured out as they are done. He was in Norfolk [Annotator's Note: Norfolk Naval Shipyard, also called Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia] repairing ships. The underbodies of ships during the war were pretty uniform. He had a company later that had divers that worked on jobs that required security clearances. He left Norfolk to go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard [Annotator's Note: Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York, New York] for more repairs. They spent a month there. He was there when an airplane hit the Empire State Building [Annotator's Note: 28 July 1945, New York, New York]. It was a B-25 [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber]. They left Brooklyn to Casco Bay, Maine to a fueling base. They berthed there and vessels came to them for repairs, mostly destroyer escorts. Most of the repairs were to appendages that stuck out from under the vessels. He would make a couple of dives per repair needed. He was there less than a year and then he was discharged.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks George Wiswell what it was like when the war ended.] Thank goodness it was over. He was never involved in combat, but he had many friends that were and were killed. He used the G.I. Bill. During the Depression [Annotator's Note: Great Depression; a global economic depression that lasted through the 1930s], many colleges in the Northeast went to parents of young kids and had them apply for early admission with a small payment. His parents had enrolled him in Dartmouth [Annotator's Note: Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire]. They had a football coach named Tuss McClary [Annotator's Note: DeOrmond "Tuss" McLaughry] who was renowned. McClary had heard that Wiswell played on the Great Lakes [Annotator's Note: Naval Station Great Lakes in Great Lakes, Illinois] football team in boot camp and was glad he was coming to the school. Wiswell went for admissions. Dartmouth decided to bring in impoverished Blacks [Annotator's Note: African-Americans] from Harlem to fill 100 percent of the incoming class. Wiswell was out. Wiswell got a year of credit to go to Colby [Annotator's Note: Colby College in Waterville, Maine]. He started in spring and graduated in 1950. He met his wife there. She helped him through his last two years. He got a major in Psych-Soc [Annotator's Note: Psychology and Sociology]. After he had started a company [Annotator's Note: Marine Contracting, Inc. in Southport, Maine] and had 13 engineering patents issued to him, somebody asked him why he was not a Professional Engineer [Annotator's Note: also called PE, engineer licensed by a state to practice]. He could not get in because of his degree. He went to night school and they still did not want to give him the title. He got angry and walked out. The next day he got his certificate hand delivered. The Navy taught him to think.

George Wiswell started his own business after the war [Annotator's Note: Marine Contracting, Inc. followed by Southport Marine, Inc., followed by Wiswell, Inc.; all in Southport, Maine]. He was with his father's advertising agency. Wiswell liked travel and vacation. He was account supervisor for Northeast Airlines where his uncle worked. The owner of Northeast Airlines wife was Jackie Cochran [Annotator's Note: United States Air Force Reserve Command Colonel Jacqueline "Jackie" Cochran; American pilot, business executive, and women's aviation pioneer; commander of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or, WASPs in World War 2] and she wanted Wiswell on their board. Wiswell met Jim Briggs who had an agency in New York. Wiswell's father died and Delta [Annotator's Note: Delta Air Lines, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia] bought Northeast Airlines. Wiswell got fired from the agencies after they combined. Wiswell knew an engineer at another company who had a problem that required diving. Wiswell was hired to regularly work for them. They said he needed to make a company. He started his company in 1962. [Annotator's Note: Wiswell tells a lot of stories about the jobs he worked on.] He worked with Aramco [Annotator's Note: Saudi Aramco, officially Saudi Arabian Oil Company, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia] in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s. They built a tanker loading facility in the Persian Gulf. There is a clam that lives in the substrate at the bottom there. The concrete piles of the shipping docks were being perforated by the clams. Wiswell's company was chosen as the sole consultant. He literally went around the world twice looking for technology to solve the problem. He does not have anything nice to say about the Saudi engineer who was a member of the royal family. His company solved the problem.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks George Wiswell about a job his company did after the war in Pakistan.] When Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was exterminating the Jews, he thought that all Poles [Annotator's Note: persons from Poland] were Jews. One family went to Auschwitz [Annotator's Note: Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex in German occupied Oswiecim, Poland]. They were tattooed. Andre Zerserksy [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify] escaped and managed to make it to America. He got degrees in engineering. Wiswell got to know him quite well. Later on, Zerserksy called him from the office of the Ambassador in Pakistan. Wiswell got a passport with unlimited entries and exits. He was told to come as soon as he could. He was met by a Colonel of the Pakistani Green Berets [Annotator's Note: Pakistan Army Special Service Group] in Islamabad [Annotator's Note: Islamabad, Pakistan]. They went to the dam [Annotator's Note: Tarbela Dam, Indus River, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan]. The Soviets had occupied Afghanistan and the United States thought they were going to annex the dam. The dam has limitless generating capacity. His task was to install trash racks in ten-story high buildings that were underwater. They did the job without incident. He credits his ability to the Navy teaching him to read, write, and think and to take responsibility. He did not realize how serious the threat was from the Soviets until the job was almost over and he learned that the company that had hired his friend was based in Langley, Virginia [Annotator's Note: the location of the United States Central Intelligence Agency or CIA]. He took it very seriously then.

George Wiswell says the past is a prologue to the future. What you learn is important. The Navy taught him to pay attention to things and think of what the end result is; think responsibly. College taught him that even more. Engineering taught him much more, but it all goes back to the beginning. He is pleased with what he has done in his life. He went up with some Navy pilots one day in Norfolk [Annotator's Note: Norfolk Naval Shipyard, also called Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia] who were towing targets. Seeing the tracer bullets coming at him was scary. The first time his feet were on the bottom in his heavy diving suit, he thought "Why am I here?" He served because it was bred into him. He never would have thought otherwise. World War 2 changed the world tremendously all for the good but it has slipped. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Wiswell what he thinks the war means to America today.] Nothing. He is proud of his service. He wanted to do it. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Wiswell if he thinks The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana is important for teaching future generations about the war.] Very much so. Many people today do not pay any attention to making this a safer place against bad people. The war should be taught. So should World War 1, the Civil War [Annotator's Note: American Civil War, 1861 to 1865], the Revolution [Annotator's Note: American Revolutionary War, or, American War of Independence, 19 April 1775 to 3 September 1783]. They are all important. You study the mistakes of your predecessors.