Culver Military Academy - Roll Call Yearbook (Culver, IN)

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g.,-pq ,Y Vinh, ......- - -...-.- . . . Culver Military Academy, home of 600 cadets and almost half as many officers and employees, seems now almost as well known to us as our own backyards at home. But actually, how well do we know our Culver? 1 found out. Are you aware that it's practically a city-a city that could exist on its own resources for months, if some calamity cut it off suddenly from all communication with everything and everybody outside? Of course, our small city, if so cut off from the world, would lose its communi- cations first-to the everlasting sorrow of all of us. Rex, lord of the academy post office, would no longer hand out the 15,000 letters each week from home and beauty that help make life easier, if not exactly easy. Then, too, the 15,000 other letters that go from us to our families and flames and the heavy mail fro1n the academy to our fam- ilies would stop. Rex came here twenty-two years ago-to found the first canteen, then located in the YMCA quarters. In 1921 he began distributing mail. Five hundred memos to the faculty, each placed in the proper box, are his biggest problem, but fat-headed questions from cadets, usually about the color of the envelopes on friend roommate's letter, add to his troubles. He never has time to read any- body's postcards but might like to, if times ever get easier. Mail is picked up in the barracks twice a day, at breakfast and at noon, but, alas, only given out once. Rushes come at Thanksgiving, Easter, and Valentine's Day, naturally. But some Joe averaged seven letters a day, even in the rainy season. I wonder. We'd miss our telephone calls, too--10,000 come and go annually over the present switchboard. In the old days, all calls came through Mr. Henning's ofiiee. That's prob- ably why he looks so happy nowadays. Also, cadets had to get permission to make a call or send a telegram from a Major Stoutenburgh, who could sign his initials to the hopeful Romeo's plea-ASS. Sixty telegrams come to the Academy every week, but the maximum number ever re- ceived by a single cadet was 140-by Amon Carter Jr., at his Commencement. Like Rex, the postmaster, Ines and Esther, the switch- board operators, know an amazing lot about all of us-our names and addresses, our roommates and phone numbers. They say it's fascinating work. They should know. It would be a nuisance not to get a letter from home or be able to reverse the charges on a phone call to the little woman, but even if we were cut off, we'd still eat. The

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a man at Culver who can honestly say that Colonel Mac hasn't been the squarest shooter he knows. Those eagles on his shoulders were earned at a pretty early age, too- whatever he does seems to be done efficiently and well. At the Faculty Hobby Show there were some professional- looking pieces of furniture that came from the Com- mandant's workshop-a lot of personal activities seem to be carried on after just about the longest working day of anyone connected with the Academy. I've seen him at all sorts of hours, around the buildings and grounds, inspect- ing, checking, seeing that the conduct and morale of the corps were all that they should be. When you went on the carpet for a bawling-out, you got it hard, but you knew you deserved it, and you bore no hard feelings. On the other hand, when you went into the double office to the left of the Sally Port on business, you soon found that the Colonel and Miss Romig were two people who really knew their jobs and with whom it was a real pleasure to work. JOHN SEDDON FLEET, Colonel, CMA, has been connected with Culver almost since the day it was started. His father was the head of the old Missouri Military Academy that moved here at the invitation of our founder, when its own plant burned down, soon after Culver had been launched. The Colonel was thus one of the earliest cadets, and soon after his arrival, he was helping to establish the Maroonis reputation on the athletic field. From here he went to the University of Virginia, and later abroad, to study many things, but mainly his beloved classics. When he addresses us as Gentlemen,', he makes us feel like gentlemen, be- cause he's so very sincere and convincing in everything he does. I wasn't any great shakes as a Latin student, so I didn't get much chance to know him till last fall, but since then I've found him a most sympathetic- and well-informed advisor to me as well as tl1e rest of the First Class. My choice of a college, and to a large extent my certainty that it's the right one for my needs and plans and abilities Csueh as they arej, I owe to his courteous and generous advice. Ilve never known him to appear hurried, and l've never known him to waste words. In all my life, 1 never expect to meet anyone who so honestly, courteously, consider- ately, and kindly means exactly what he says. In charge of admissions is COLONEL JOHN IIENDERSON, who came to Culver in June, 1919, shortly after leaving the army. He enlisted as a private in 1917, attended the fourth Officers, Training Camp, became Assistant Adjutant of the Coast Artillery Schools, and before the end of the war was Assistant to the Chief of Coast Artillery at Washing- ton. Some rise! From the time of his arrival here until 1930 he was Y.M.C.A. secretary and the following year took over his present job as Admissions Director. From 192-1 till 1930 he was Commandant of the Summer Wooclcraft School and for two years commanded the Culver City post of the American Legion, as well as doing a great deal of 'Yi work. Since 1935 he has been treasurer of the Culver Fathers' Association. llis department is one of the biggest, busiest, and most important in the school. But we must move along now to get a cadet's-eye-view of the plant .... COLONEL C. F. MCKINNEX CIOIKJNICI. J. S. Fl.ICIC'l' COLONEL J. W. IIENDERSON

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-- A -' Zuni ' Mess Hall could take care of us for quite a while before weid feel the pinch, even though it would have to go on serving 2,016 meals every day. I've walked through the store rooms and seen the things there are to be seen there. Three hundred and fifty gallons of milk a day are pasteur- ized-enough to satisfy almost any plebe. Canned goods and vegetables are stored in tons in the basement, as well as the big annex where, daily, trucks pull up to deliver enormous quantities of foodstuffs. Charlie, who came to the Mess Hall in 1904, has at one time or another visited every military academy in the country, to inspect service and equipment. He's never found one that can match ours in size or completeness. He also can remember the time when the boys appreciated the silverware as souvenirs so much that it was necessary Qespecially before Christmasl for the Commandant to in- spect all cadets for any spoons or forks that might acci- dentally have fallen into a pocket or cap. A typical meal, so they tell me, might obliterate 225 chickens or 375 pounds of pork loins or 275 pounds of baked ham. Thirteen bushels of spinach swim onto the tables at a time, or five bushels of beans, or 400 pounds of potatoes. Three hun- dred pounds of bananas, or 198 pounds of grapes, or five crates of pears might disappear in the thirty minutes the average meal lasts. What small city, or country town, doesn't have its own general store? We have ours-the Store and Tailor Shop. The will supply you, in return for your check or coupon, with about everything you could get in a ten-cent store, a hardware store, a clothing store, a jewelry store, a drug store, a sporting-goods store, cleaners' shop, a shoe shop, or you name it. Every uniform worn by every cadet is hand tailored in the workshop. If all the grey worsted and whipcord and all the blue overcoating and material used in fatigue blouses were sewn together, it would make a tent big enough to cover the quadrangle and all the buildings around it and leave enough over for a marquee all the way down Pershing Walk-if anybody wanted that kind of tent. They could clean it, too-the Tailor Shop uses 2,000 gallons and more of cleaning Huid every year to take the spots off forty tons of garments, or enough to load a freight train stretching from here to there. Shoe polish Cremember Plebe year?j comes from here, too. Kiwi seems to be what the boys are using nowadays, and they use enough cans of it to make a pile, if placed end to end, taller than the flagpole. I wonder what happens to the 10,000 records that cross the counter annually. I never got to play my own very muchg but somebody must have, because they're all pretty well shot now. One-third of the corps buys a new dic- tionary every year, besides all the textbooks used in aca- demic and military classes. Sixty gross of pencils-plain ordinary pencils-are used from September till June. By sticking those in the ground one inch apart you could make a fence along the waterfront from the Generalis house to the tennis courts. Alarm clocks, so useful for borrowing when you go on guard, are sold to the tune of twelve dozen a year. One last thing, lest we forget we're a military organization with Spit 'an Polish as our twin gods: we needed 3,000 yards of white belting, as plebes, to dress our chests, and we need 28,000 buttons to hold us together for all purposes, and I do mean all purposes. We have our own printing plant in our model city, too. Here two presses rumble and groan, turning out such items as the well-known pink slips, taps reports, privilege records and all the 300-odd forms now used by the acad- emy. General orders used to be printed, but today thcy're turned out on the hectograph. Mr. Mattox, third man to run the print shop, learned his art here in the academy after his arrival in 1927, having previously been a grade- school teacher. He has two job presses-ten by fifteen plate size, equipped with the latest in Kluge feeders-very efficient, very expensive. So what if the presses only clank, and don't really rumble or groan? They work. don't they? Of course, if some dough-heavy patriot would donate a larger press, he could make Mr. Mattox very, very happy. It's on account of the Message Center Record Sheet. You see, the thing's so big it has to be printed in sections, first the top, then the bottom. Then there's the Canteen. I went in there for a coke on my fact-finding tour and settled back into a sort of dream at the things they told me-a dream compounded of car- bonated beverages, hasty meals, tall tales, sandwiches, hot dogs, permits, and a slight case of indigestion. We drank 3,000 cases of cokes a year-enough to float the Admiral Rodman, and in my dazed state I could see just that happening. A company of hamburgers winged their way by to land like ducks in autumn on the lake. A battalion of sandwiches and a squadron of milk-shakes marched past- just one dayls load, boys, just one day's load. The Canteen, by the way, isn't a money-making con- cern. Founded in 1919 as the Exchange and originally