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

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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

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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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under the control of the YMCA, three-fourths of its profits are turned over to the corps and distributed accord- ing to the size of the organization. That system has been going for twelve years, and this was the first 1'd heard of it. Seems a good system to mc. By the way, itis vanilla, four to one. Speaking of eats, there's always the Shack. Good old Shack, itis been there for thirty years, but in its present slate only for the last five. Sunday is the big day there with two to three hundred meals served to cadets and guests at one sitting. There are usually three people be- hind the counter, and the atmosphere is less formal than anywhere else around except the club rooms. The Inn itself has been here fifty-five years, and in its time has played host to a fair number of national and even inter- national celebrities. It can accommodate 156 people if they're all willing to sleep two to a room. Last remodeled in 1933, it is designed to accommodate, the best it can, the ACHCICIIIYIS widely varying needs. On a winter weekday the place seems deserted, but on a big weekend every inch of space is filled, as you and I know all too well. I don't suppose there's any system that could be put in that would really satisfy everybody, except in the summer, the Inn is only needed for weekends, and to expand it for them only would be wasteful. In four years here there's been only one thing I've never heard complaints about-the quality of the food in the Inn dining room. 1t's a wallop to the pocketbook to feed the little woman there very often, but it was a wonderful morale-restorer to go down there once in a while to feed on a steak that was cooked just the way you wanted it and served HOT. And when you felt that some expensive little 'trinket would make some blonde doll more eager to remember you, that's where you went to get it. It didn't always work, but I tried, more than once., and so did you, you liar. I never knew much about art, but just being here has taught me something anyway. I was very much interested to find that in the art collection of the academy there are ten volumes of Brady's Photographic History of the Civil War. These pictures were the first photos, and as I under- stand are very hard to get. Captain Barada secured them for the academy. There are also 300 pictures of the , Napoleanie conquests Cno, they're not photographsj. Of course, you have all been through the Music and Art Building just as I have and were probably just as sur- prised at the amazing fields covered by this department of Culver. For instance, Major Stinchcomb rules over a sec- tion on ceramics. The Carnegie set, of which we have heard so much, consists of 850 pictures and 125 books on different phases of art. I also found after careful examina- tion that the machine in the art room which looks like a pants presser is in reality a picture mounting press. We were extremely lucky to get the Carnegie Art Set as 1 understand it. Last summer while Captain Barada was in New York on a buying tour he applied for a set. At the time such a set was unavailable, but when Captain Barada explained the Culver art program and displayed what progress had already been made toward this end, the sample set which had been used as a display prior to this time was presented to Culver. The Art Committee is dividing and classifying the present art collection into groups according to time and subject in an effort to corre- late the arts with other subjects being taught, such as his- tory and English. Our city also has its livery stable although in this case it is the stable and riding hall of the Black Horse Troop. The present riding hall dates only to 1917 when the pre- vious one burned down. I found that it held 137 Troop horses, 2 privately owned horses and one Arabian stallion. fWhooppeeI Hi Yo Silver.j As is to be expected, the largest horse is Knight, which is ridden by Lieutenant Graham, the smallest is a polo horse called Bird. Thatis for Weiss. Those horses eat over a ton of hay-every day besides whatever else they eat. They are exercised at least once a day in the ring next to the riding hall, but the hardest workout comes when the troopers are turned loose on the poor, innocent animals. But of course, this must be entirely evident. The riding hall is used for innumerable exhibitions throughout the year such as the Thanksgiving parade, Lancers, Four Gun Drill, and the jumping shows. Of course, on Saturdays during the winter it is used for polo. The most familiar figure of the riding hall to cadets and the most unnoticed by visitors is Skippy. Nine or ten mice and two or three rats are Skippy,s daily diet, but this