Lorene Auld was born in December 1919 in Lark, Oklahoma. She grew up on a farm and thought it was wonderful. They had a two-room schoolhouse and they walked to school or went in a wagon. She went through the eighth grade there. Her father grew cotton, corn, feed, and other vegetables. She had a younger brother and older sister. Her grandfather lived with them. It was his house and he died when she was ten. Her father had the first radio in the community. They had the first washing machine and he invited the community to use it as well. During the Great Depression they stayed, but in the late 1930s there was a dam going in that would cover the farm with water, so they moved. Auld was in junior college when they moved. She attended Murray State College in Tishomingo, Oklahoma and graduated in 1936. She then went to East Central State College in Ada, Oklahoma and received a teaching certificate. She then taught school in the school she had attended. By the time the war arrived, her parents were living in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which was a large oil field area. Tinker Field, later Tinker Air Force Base, was built there in 1941.

Growing up, there were very few jobs for women. Lorene Auld's parents had ambition for her. They were living in a small house in Lark, Oklahoma. Reps from Murray State College in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, were looking for new students and visited the family. She worked for her room and board. Her father had been born in Louisiana and her mother was born in Indian Territory. Her father had served in World War 1, but he did not talk much about it. He was stationed in the State of Washington cutting wood to build airplanes. For herself, Auld wanted to be a teacher and that is what she prepared for in college. At the time, jobs were very scarce, but she did start teaching in elementary school. She then went to work as a secretary working on a teletype machine. At another company she was the second woman ever hired and she had the responsibility to set up an inventory system. She was there for about six months when Douglas Aircraft Company was opening near Tinker Air Force Base and they needed workers. She went to work there as a clerk in production control in the machine shops. She describes the process in detail. The building housed a production line that was one mile long. She had the opportunity to attend some workshops on production control.

Lorene Auld had been working for about a year at Douglas Aircraft Company when the acting president of Murray State College in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, needed someone to teach business classes. She took the job offer and that led to working with the G.I. Bill after the war. The President of the college, Clive E. Murray, asked her to learn all about it. She was amazed and felt that the program was the greatest thing that happened for the returning soldiers. She had married before the war, but it did not work out when he returned. She met another man who had returned from Europe and was in the Oklahoma National Guard. He went into the Active Reserve and they went to University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. While there, Auld taught at the Air Force Clerk Typist School.

The soldiers that Lorene Auld taught [Annotator's Note: at the Air Force Clerk Tyoist School in Norman, Oklahoma], were very positive people who did not talk of the war. They had come back to make lives for themselves. Their World War 2 experiences were not talked about. Her own husband did not even talk about his service until he started genealogy research later in life. He never spoke to her even about having been in the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Counteroffensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945, Ardennes, Belgium]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer backs up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor]. Auld had a baby girl on 3 December 1941 and was still in the hospital with her on 7 December. She learned about Pearl Harbor in Oklahoma City with 4-day-old child. She was very concerned about it. Earlier when she was in college, she had a history teacher who was concerned about war in Europe. Auld's husband had been sent to the Pacific Theater just after their child was born. She became very ill after giving birth and was in bed for three months. She did not think about much more than trying to survive with her little girl. After her husband returned from the Pacific, she felt more mature and she could not see staying with someone with his problems. He did not talk about his war experiences, nobody did.

Lorene Auld's second husband's family had a laundry business in the town she lived in. She met him at the Methodist Church and he invited her to dinner. She was not ready for that, so he dated someone else for a while. He asked again later and she went this time. Her daughter cried then because she had to have a babysitter, so he insisted that they take her with them from then on. They were engaged in May 1947 and then married in August 1947. Both Auld and her husband got jobs at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and she was able to finish her master's degree while there. Her husband then took a job at Southern Louisiana Industrial Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana in August 1956.

Lorene Auld had applied to work at Douglas Aircraft Company in Oklahoma during the war because they were looking for people who had her skills. Her father worked in transportation there and her mother was an electrical parts inspector. They were very happy to be contributing to the war effort. People carpooled then and that is how Auld got back and forth to work, working seven days a week for eight hours a day for the war effort. The people she worked with were mostly from Oklahoma. Many of them had come to work there from California when the plant was moved to be farther from the coast in case of Japanese attacks. They had a famous bomber land there once and they were allowed to go out and see it. She had never ridden on a C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo and transport aircraft] until she had to fly to New Mexico once. It was exciting to know that she was flying in one of the planes she had helped build. [Annotator's Note: Auld talks at length about her husband studying data processing.]

To help the war effort, Lorene Auld bought savings bonds. She remembers the rationing. While teaching school she had a student whose father made leather sandals, so she bought some since it was hard to find shoes. Gasoline was rationed. Everyone helped each other out. She learned to drink tea without sugar since it was rationed as well. Auld feels that teaching World War 2 history to future generations is very important to be able to keep the country safe and to maintain the US Constitution. Auld's daughter and her husband taught for the Department of Defense for decades.

Lorene Auld and her sister were not aware of anything they could join for the war effort where they were in Oklahoma. Her sister's husband trained in Missouri. He went to France and was on the front laying communications lines. He was an excellent marksman which he felt saved his life. Auld had a cousin who lost her husband in Italy during the war. She never thought about her husband losing his life and she always planned for the best. Working at Douglas Aircraft Company in Oklahoma was great. A tornado came through while there and destroyed all the houses except for her parent's house. While listening to the reports of this, she heard that President Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] had just died. Several people had been killed by the tornado. Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and later 34th President of the United States] listed the C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo and transport aircraft] as one of the things that won the war and Auld is happy to have been part of that. All walks of life came together in dedication to the work.