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

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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

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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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isn't unusual for a fox terrier with a job like Skippy's. It is this heroic work of Skippy's which keeps the hall free from rats and mice. All this talk about troopers reminds me of something I heard while I was at the stenographic depart- ment. The girls that work here say they don't much care for the flies brought in by the troopers. How about that, boys? While we're on the subject of the stenographic depart- ment, I might just as well tell you what I found out there on my walk around my own backyard. There are four stenographers and one clerical girl. In the office they operate typewriters, ditto machine, ediphones, and mimeo- graph machines. All told, they use about 5,000 staples of paper per week. Everyone knows how hard it is to write letters. Well, these girls write thousands of letters a year. The only trouble is that they don,t get any answers for all their work. The stenographers are allowed to play records while at work, but as usual there is a catch. The records have to be ediphone records which instructors have dic- tated and want copied. After the typist has finished copy- ing the dictation, it goes on the ditto machine, and out comes the required number of copies. This department seems to be the place to pick up just about all the knowl- edge one wants in any subject since all kinds of sheets for all kinds of topics go through the hands of the stenog- raphers. These girls say they like the instructors, and it seems that certain instructors like them, since they present the girls with boxes of candy. Here they even print books, for instance, Colonel Shanks' math texts and Mr. Goode's masterwork First Aid to Writers, which is so familiar to every First Classman. I am of the opinion, however, that a good collection of ideas for short stories and themes would be a much greater help. As a Hnal parting shot on this department I might add that the girls say they would like to know more cadets. I was walking past the laundry the other day and thought I would stop in just to see what actually went on there. I found out all right. There are four large washing machines, six roll Hat ironers, eleven pressers, a finishing iron and table, one puff ironer CI was told that thing was a puff ironer, but if anyone can tell me in simple words just exactly what a puff ironer is, I should always be gratefulj, sock forms Chere is something else I can't understand. When my socks come back, they don't have any form at allj. Dry room tumbler for turkish towels QHeh! That's clever. Let me say that again. Dry room tumbler for u:-ff' .. turkish towelsj and extractors to give the right amount of water after clothing has been washed. Wray back when. the laundry of our mythological city really used to be the laundry of a small city. Before 1931 all laundry from the academy used to go to Maiben's Laundry in Logansport. which used to give the academy five-day service on all washing. Now under our present private laundry the cadets get two-day service, and the academy departments get all laundry back within one day. I don't wonder my towels come back clean even after I have mopped the floor with them. All clothing that goes to the laundry gets three soapings and eleven rinses. What amazed me most about this section of the complete Culver was how the laundry could keep the thirty odd pieces sent each week by every cadet straight and get the right laundry back to the right cadet. After the clothes have been marked, sorted as to color and material, washed, and dried. they are sorted out into smaller piles which are again sorted for each cadet and placed in a box provided for him. Before being sent out to the barracks the laundry in the boxes is again checked. Besides handling the laundry of members of the corps this establishment must take all the washing of various parts of the school such as the mess hall, infirmary, and the Inn. It seems that at Culver haircuts are as necessary as clean laundry, so we have in our city a barber shop com- pletely equipped except for a striped barber pole. Here our two barbers average forty to fifty haircuts a day, which isn't bad for any small city barber. However, Slim gives about only three or four massages a week, and approximately the same number of shampoos. Slim tells me there have been only 165 thousand haircuts since he has been here. Is that all? The first barber shop was in the room between the Second Class club room and Main Bar- rack. Then about 1920f22 a second barber shop was in- stalled up in the gym especially for thc plebes. Those were evidently the days when one didn't have to wait for hours to get a haircut just to please the supply sergeant. Then both shops were moved to the present location, which accounts for the four chairs. Our town has its library, too-probably the most beau- tiful building on the campus. Therc's one room in Culver where people always speak in hushed voices, and thatis the quiet, grey room at the head of the stairs in the Memorial Building. It's a good room, one appropriate to its purpose, that makes you feel at once, in some intangible way, the dignity and decency of those whose pictures line the walls. 4,41-f fi. ,a-f'