Almost ninety, Mr. Johnson sat in his living room in Fallbrook, California. He told me about his younger days, “Yes, I brought some of these beautiful art carvings from China. I've had them almost sixty years, and you should have seen the crude tools they used. I was in Shanghai from nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty five working with an American electrical motor company. This was a time when Shanghai was the crossroads of the Orient. Everybody from the United States hung out at The Little Club or The American Club where I did a lot of drinking and visiting with people like Jimmy Doolittle. He was a real wild man, and he liked to fly fighter planes. He's forgotten me now, but we used to know each other and had some laughs together in those days.
I had a pair of perfectly matched pistols with wooden handles. Well, I had these pistols and I used to see General Patton wearing his pistols with beautifully carved ivory handles. News reporters called his pistols pearl handled, but they were made of ivory. Once I heard him say, “My pistols have ivory handles. Only pimps and prostitutes carry pearl handled guns." He strutted around with those pistols. I wanted some like them.
After making some inquiries, I was taken to a very poor section where the streets were so skinny you could hardly walk without bumping into people coming the other way. The streets were crowded with little stores. An old Chinese man worked in the back of a shop carving ivory. I had taken the wooden handles off my pistols for him to use as models. I would not have dared leaving the assembled pistols with him because of laws prohibiting ownership of arms by civilians. Civilian firearms were illegal. The old Chinese man used tools that were old, worn out knives, saws, and chisels. But the work he did was magnificent, and he charged very little. I was very pleased when I returned to the shop a week later to pick up the ivory handles. I treasured those duel pistols during the years in Shanghai but sold them to a rich Chinese potentate before we left. They were real beauties.
“An American ex-convict owned a nightclub named The Little Club. He had food, music, cocktails, and dancing going on in the evenings. There were twenty five hundred Americans living in Shanghai. Many of them came to The Little Club or to the American Club where I was surprised to meet an American movie star named Joe E. Brown. He had a big mouth and a toothy smile, and everybody loved him. He was a wonderful comedian.
The Chinese seemed to like the Americans more than they did the British, French, or Italians. There were clubs in town for each nationality to feel comfortable in. Soldiers from each of these nations were in Shanghai to help save China from the Japanese. China was being invaded, and we were very proud of the job our United States Marines were doing to help hold back the Japanese. English troops were called Tommies and they were the least respected by the Chinese. The British had occupied Shanghai for over eighty years since the 1842 Opium War, and they helped make Shanghai the chief industrial center in China.
We were close to the waterfront which was known as the burd. The Wang Poo River was deep enough to handle small steamers that came chugging up to unload at the piers of Shanghai. Then the boats anchored out in the river and waited for goods to be piled close to the piers for loading the following day. Sailing back down river they finally crossed the shallow sand bars and reached the deeper waters of the Yangtze River where the deep keeled, larger steamers waited for cargo.
Sometimes life was cruel and cheap the way people treated each other. I remember seeing a criminal being punished on land close to a little airport. The man's hands were tied, and he was forced to bend over to be put to death. A sharp sword was used to cut off his head as we looked on from a distance. It was very public. It was the way people were punished by the law. A Chinese man told me another way the law punished criminals. The prisoner was tied standing with his back to a wall so he couldn't move. A bucket of water was hung above his head with a hole in the bucket so it would leak slowly. The water would drip, drip, drip on the criminal's head. On and on it dripped so the man couldn't rest. Day in and day out the culprit was held still in a standing position with the water dripping endlessly until the man lost his mind and died.
Mussolini, the leader of Italy had several fighting ships in the river with men standing guard to protect his daughter who lived in Shanghai. We felt safe and we loved life in Shanghai. We had many servants to help make our lives comfortable. We were there during the best years long before our war with Hitler and Tojo.”
Mr. Johnson showed me some carvings from China, and then he showed me an old muzzle loading shot gun. It was hand made with a half inch diameter pipe used for the barrel, and it was four feet long. It did not have a stock like most rifles do. Instead, it had a wooden pistol handle. Mr. Johnson said, “I saw an old Chinese man who was in the fields outside of town and he was hunting pheasants. It was illegal for Chinese civilians to own guns, but some of the men were allowed to have them for hunting. We found bits and pieces of iron or other metal in wild duck or pheasant we ate in restaurants. The hunters could not afford to buy lead or buckshot. They used any pieces of scrap metal they could find for bullets. First they poured black gun powder into the end of the barrel and used a long rod to tamp it down toward the firing cap. Then the bits of metal were dumped in, and the gun ready to be cocked, aimed, and fired. I was lucky to be able to buy this gun from the old man. The gun was already old when I purchased it almost sixty years ago. I bet there are no others like it in the world.”
He handed me the old gun and I tested the trigger. It worked perfectly, and the gun was easy to cock. I tried holding the pistol shaped handle while extending the gun, but the yard long barrel was too heavy. I used two hands to point the gun at the fireplace as the old man finished his story about Shanghai.