Vincent DeSalvo was born in September 1920 in Hammond, Louisiana. His family left Hammond when he was five years old. When Desalvo was four years old, his father was driving some people home and was in an accident. His father died one week later at age 50. The older children raised the younger ones and DeSalvo was a momma's boy. They went to New Orleans and opened a grocery store. He graduated and made his Catholic confirmation there. The family went in different directions after having to sell the store during the Great Depression. When DeSalvo was 12 years old, he went to stay with his brother's family in Hammond. He worked there on their strawberry farm until he was 18 years old. They always had food, just no money. At 18, he went to New Orleans to barber school. This was in June 1939. It was very hard to leave the farm because there was really no one to work it. DeSalvo went to work after barber school. He only did one shave that first day. His take was 60 percent of 15 cents per shave. Nine cents were more than he had made in one day previously. He later was earning between seven and eight dollars a week. The man he worked for had a happy and close family despite being very poor. DeSalvo considers this a highlight of his life. There ultimately was not enough business for the both of them so DeSalvo left for another job. His brother and sister came to see him in May of that year and were in a terrible car wreck which killed his brother.

Vincent DeSalvo was a barber in New Orleans and was at the hospital to visit a customer of his who had been in accident. That is where he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He did not know where Pearl Harbor was and thought it was at Puget Sound, Washington. The automatic registration had started for the service in October 1940. The people who enlisted then were to serve for one year and then they would be discharged. Pearl Harbor changed that. A hospital was being built on the lakefront in New Orleans. An Army colonel came into the barber shop. He was the head of the new hospital. DeSalvo's boss got the concession to run the barber shop in the new hospital and he turned it over to DeSalvo. That was a great thing in his life. It was a better neighborhood for business. Jimmy Dorsey [Annotator's Note: James Francis Dorsey, American jazz musician and big band leader] released a song called "Let's Build A Stairway to The Stars." After hearing it, DeSalvo prayed and said he would build it with God's help, and he feels he did that. He feels it was strange that he was drafted and ended up in the US Army Air Forces and not the infantry. He went to Camp Beauregard [Annotator's Note: in Pineville, Louisiana], then ended up at Keesler Field [Annotator's Note: now Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi] for basic training which surprised him. The men were then moved out alphabetically. He was in the first shipment out to Gulfport Field. [Annotator's Note: The Gulfport Army Air Field in Gulfport, Mississippi was a training site for Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bombers from 1944 to 1945.] The second group went to Arlington, Texas, then to B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] and then to Europe. That is where he would have gone except for his name. He stayed at Gulfport Field for a good while.

Vincent DeSalvo was drafted into the US Army Air Force. He was at Gulfport Field in Gulfport, Mississippi for a while before being shipped to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, to Third Air Force headquarters. There were B-26s [Annotator's Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber] there, nicknamed the "widow maker" because so many crashed. Modifications were made to the wing of the aircraft making it safer to fly. DeSalvo brought his barber tools with him. He was doing anything they told him and cut hair on his own time to make extra money. He then went to Avon Park, Florida to the bombing range. He cut the CQ's [Annotator's Note: Charge of Quarters] hair one night and he charged him. He sent the money home to his mother. Once, at Keesler Field [Annotator's Note: now Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi], he was giving free haircuts but then decided to charge for them. The mosquitos were very bad at Avon Park. At MacDill, he inspected and issued parachutes at night. He said that he would rather be overseas than at Avon Park because of the mosquitos. He was put on a 21 day shipment from Avon Park to Kearns, Utah during which he got to go home on furlough. They used to call the bases "cemeteries with lights." It was very cold in Kearns and DeSalvo was downcast and homesick. He took his overseas training there from combat infantrymen. He went from there to California and boarded a ship at San Pedro. DeSalvo and a friend went to the Hollywood Canteen and Hedy Lamarr [Annotator's Note: born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Lamarr was an Austrian-born American actress, inventor, and film producer] was selling donuts. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. They boarded the USNS General Simon B. Buckner [Annotator's Note: cannot verify that this is correct vessel]. He felt sorry for the crew as the shipped was really packed. They crossed the Pacific Ocean unescorted. He decided to cut hair. The ship was well-armed with a six-inch gun and several 20mm guns [Annotator's Note: Oerlikon 20mm auto-cannon]. He cut hair on the fantail [Annotator's Note: overhang of the deck extending aft of the sternpost of a ship] of the ship. He loved it. He was charging for the haircuts. It took seven weeks to get to Melbourne, Australia. They stayed there for three days. A guy had a load of pies on a bicycle and DeSalvo bought a half dozen and discovered they were mutton pies. After three days, two British corvettes [Annotator's Note: small warship] escorted them to Bombay, India. The stench at the train station was really bad. They got on an old World War 1 era train. The bathrooms were just holes in the floor. They went to Calcutta, India and crossed the Ganges River on barges. They ended up at a base in Kanchipuram, India. DeSalvo wondered what the heck he was doing there.

Vincent DeSalvo was with the 3rd Air Force and was sent to Calcutta, India. They served them chicken for Sunday dinner and the men were wanting haircuts. He got in line to eat and they ran out of chicken. He was mad but then later, everyone who ate chicken got dysentery. They traveled by train to Kanchipuram, India where they were the first people at that base. They were still building the base and landing strips. They were in the Assam province which was tea country. They had B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] that had been converted to C-109s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated C-109 Liberator Express cargo aircraft] to carry gasoline. They also had C-47s [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft] there too. DeSalvo's specialty had no title so because he was a barber he was still cutting hair. He was also rigging parachutes and doing whatever he was asked. They were transporting supplies across the Hump [Annotator's Note: name given by Allied pilots to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew to resupply the Chinese war effort]. A friend of his built barber chairs there, and a shop was opened in the Post Exchange, so he cut hair there for a while. It was rear echelon duty. When asked what "ATC" [Annotator's Note: Air Transport Command] stands for, he would tell people "Allergic to Combat". It seemed as though time was not passing. He went on a two-week rest leave in the mountains in Darjeeling. They were taken on old, dilapidated trucks. He was worried about the truck rolling over. The weather was beautiful there. At his base, he had to deal with monsoons. He spent two weeks there and took a lot of pictures. On the last day he decided to go to the Red Cross and get a hamburger. He got very ill with bacillary [Annotator's Note: bacillary dysentery] and was hospitalized. The hospital was run by Italian prisoners of war from the Ethiopian Campaign [Annotator's Note: East African Campaign, or Abyssinian campaign, June 1940 to November 1941]. They ran a good ship. The nurses were called sisters, so DeSalvo thought they were nuns. He returned to his base. Father McGuire [Annotator's Note: unable to locate a reference on him] was the chaplain of the whole CBI [Annotator's Note: China-Burma-India Theater] and they became close friends.

Vincent DeSalvo was with the Air Transport Command in Kanchipuram, India when he heard the news of the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. They had all been ready to ship out because they were no longer of use where they were. The B-29s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber] were flying out of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands and the war in China was a stalemate. When the military started preparing for the invasion of Japan, the airmen were told to check on their M1s [Annotator's Note: either .30 caliber M1 rifle, also referred to as the Garand semi-automatic rifle or the semi-automatic .30 caliber M1 carbine]. He later learned that Japan had 5,000 kamikaze planes hidden in the mountains to exclusively hit the troop ships. He says to imagine how many would have died if the bombs had not been dropped. From there they were waiting for a ship home. DeSalvo was in a combat area due to a British Spitfire [Annotator's Note: British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft] base being placed near them. His younger brother had gone in the service a year after him and was in the 91st Infantry Division that went to Oran, Africa and then hit Anzio [Annotator's Note: Battle of Anzio; part of Italian Campaign] with the British Eighth Army. His brother said he was told to blow up the Tower of Pisa [Annotator's Note: Leaning Tower of Pisa in Pisa, Italy] but headquarters said not to. His brother got out in October 1945 and he got out in February 1946. He came back on the USS General M. M. Patrick (AP-150).

Vincent DeSalvo was discharged from the Army Air Forces in February 1946. On the trip home [Annotator's Note: from India after the war], he was cutting hair as he had everywhere else. There was a band playing for them and he thought they were really good. When he had gone overseas, it was hot over the Equator. When he returned, he landed in San Pedro, California. When they were in the Indian Ocean, he was cutting hair and he saw someone fall overboard. The ship was stopped, they put out a dinghy to get him, and discovered the man had jumped off and was swimming away. It really shook DeSalvo up. When he got back, he was looking for jobs for barbers. He took a train to Camp Fannin, Texas where he was discharged. He rented a cab to Shreveport, Louisiana and caught a train to New Orleans. He left all his clothes on the train. He was out for two weeks and went to work for a barber. He spent 30 years as a barber. He lost his eyesight and had to quit being a barber. He went to Birmingham, Alabama in July 2005 for eight weeks. They taught him to do things he did not know he could. He lost his barber lease on 28 August and that is when Hurricane Katrina [Annotator’s Note: tropical cyclone that caused $125 billion in damage and over 1,200 deaths in New Orleans and the surrounding areas] hit. Everything he owned, including houses, was destroyed. He was grateful his family made it out, but he felt like they were gypsies. In his community, 38 people died in the flooding. The area looked like a war zone to him afterwards. He has much to be thankful for, but he had to mortgage his salvageable property which he does not like. He had a depression problem and went to a facility for help for three years. It was a good program and he was called the class clown. His wife became ill, and DeSalvo had to stop the program. But overall, he has been very lucky and is good shape for being 95 years old.