One year, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, we arrived late in the day and stayed at the hotel for the evening. My parents went to bed fairly early, but I stayed awake. My father always brought some bottles of alcoholic beverages to the family gatherings, usually whiskey and blackberry brandy. As children, we were given blackberry brandy as “medicine” for some upset stomachs and we delighted in its taste. We also used to take a drink of it on occasion when we were in Jack’s Place and no one else was there. On this particular trip, I opened the bottle of blackberry brandy and took a drink, and then another, and I don’t know how many more, but I soon was drunk and staggered into my parent’s bedroom, laughing and barely able to control my movements. My parents were not happy!
This is my place to share some memories I have of growing up in the rural town of Nassau, Rensselaer County, New York, and later practicing law in upstate New York. Recent Posts on the sidebar show only the most recent posts, but all are visible as you scroll down the main page. The posting dates are merely to put the posts in a sequence. The posts start with my youth, then to adulthood and practicing law, as well as items relating to t Nassau.. Some images will enlarge if clicked
Saturday, October 01, 2022
A Trip to New York City
One year, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, we arrived late in the day and stayed at the hotel for the evening. My parents went to bed fairly early, but I stayed awake. My father always brought some bottles of alcoholic beverages to the family gatherings, usually whiskey and blackberry brandy. As children, we were given blackberry brandy as “medicine” for some upset stomachs and we delighted in its taste. We also used to take a drink of it on occasion when we were in Jack’s Place and no one else was there. On this particular trip, I opened the bottle of blackberry brandy and took a drink, and then another, and I don’t know how many more, but I soon was drunk and staggered into my parent’s bedroom, laughing and barely able to control my movements. My parents were not happy!
Thursday, September 01, 2022
Picking Vegetables for Harry and Max
Menands Farmers Market |
Typical Strawberry Planting |
Monday, August 01, 2022
Summer Jobs
After checking in for a couple of days, we were offered a job at Latham Circle where the new Thunderbird Motel was being built. We were told that the pay was $1.90 per hour, which was not bad since the federal minimum wage had just been raised from seventy-five cents to one dollar per hour. The catch was that it would be hard labor work and that we had to be on the job by 5:30 in the morning. With no other prospects, we accepted the job and drove out to the job site the next morning. We were given pick-axes and shovels and started digging trenches for the foundation footers. The ground was heavy and stony and the work was much harder than we were used to. After the fourth day, John heard of another job opening that needed two temporary workers in addition to another college student who had been hired. The pay was less - $1.75 per hour, but the hours were regular and the work promised to be much easier. We quit the construction job, only to find out when we received our paycheck the following Friday that we were actually being paid $4.90 per hour. We tried to get rehired, but the jobs were taken. To this day I can never drive past the Thunderbird Motel without remembering that hard work.
Our new job was with the Gahagan Construction Corporation of New York City. Gahagan had been hired by the New York State Thruway Authority to complete a geophysical study of a small section of the “Berkshire Spur” that would connect the Thruway with the Massachusetts Turnpike. The particular section where we were going to work was near Chatham Center in Columbia County. The crew consisted of me, John, the other college student, and two full-time technicians from New York City. The baseline had already been marked out by a survey team, and this job was to determine the soil and bedrock conditions along that baseline. This was done by taking seismographic soundings. This was done by sending shock waves into the ground by exploding dynamite and recording the echoes using electronic sensors called geophones. The geophones were connected to a recording device in a laboratory mounted on a truck body. The resulting graph looked like a cardiogram. The soundings were made 220 feet along the baseline at a time. We would unroll two 110-foot-long cables, end to end along the baseline. A third cable connected the two cables with the instruments in the laboratory. The metal geophones, each a little smaller than a teacup, would be connected to the cables with connectors every ten feet. The shock waves were created by setting off three small dynamite charges simultaneously. I was selected to be in charge of planting the dynamite, something that I never told my parents until the summer was over. Each morning on our way to work, John and I stopped at a pull-off on Route 66 where the dynamite was stored. We had a key to a gate and another key to open the large metal storage box where the dynamite was kept. We would load a few sticks of dynamite and some blasting caps into the car and bring them to the job site. After work, we would return any dynamite and blasting caps that hadn’t been used back into the storage box.
John and the other student had the job of laying out the cables along the baseline and attaching the geophones. I used a steel crowbar near the ends of the cables and near where they met to punch a hole about 3 feet deep. I would run a wire from the laboratory to each hole and attach an electric blasting cap to the wire. I would cut the dynamite sticks in half, insert a blasting cap into the dynamite, push it into the hole, and then pack dirt back in. The technicians had explained that dynamite was actually quite safe unless triggered by a spark that was provided by the blasting cap. In fact, one could hold a match to the dynamite; it would burn but not explode. I carried dynamite and the blasting caps in my pockets.
We enjoyed the job. The work was not really hard and we weren’t rushed. There were many times when the technicians were doing their work, and we could just sit around, talk, and sometimes eat wild strawberries that we found.
One morning I screwed up. We had been given machetes to clear the path of any pricker bushes or wild raspberry vines that would prevent the cables from being laid straight. After the cables were laid I snipped at a vine with my machete and hit a cable. I didn’t completely sever it, but some of the wires inside were cut. The three of us had a quick conference and decided to say nothing. We went back to the laboratory where we would be safely away from the blast and waited. The warning horn was sounded, and the technicians detonated the dynamite. A couple of minutes later one of the technicians came out of the laboratory and traced one of the cables. He returned in a few minutes, looking grim. After he conferred with the other tactician, he said, “Boys, someone cut the cable. I don’t know who did it, and I don’t care, but don’t let it happen again.” The technicians did not have a replacement cable with them, and they spent the rest of the day carefully splicing the cable together while we picked wild strawberries and wondered whether we would keep our jobs.
That job ended toward the end of June or the beginning of July. John got a job delivering ice cream that lasted him for the rest of the summer. George Reischuck, a neighbor and friend who was a year ahead of me in school, heard that Ft. Orange Paper Company in Castleton was hiring summer help. We went there and were hired.
The Ft. Orange Paper Company was located in Castleton, New York, a few miles south of Rensselaer and Albany. Its plant was near the Hudson River and consisted of a paper-making facility, a printing plant, and the company’s offices. The paper that it manufactured was really light cardboard, the kind used in small food boxes, tissue boxes, etc. The main ingredient was old magazines and newsprint, and truckloads of it were delivered for this recycling. George and I were employed in the printing plant.
The factory was very busy that summer, and it worked three shifts. Cardboard manufactured in the mill was cut into large sheets, probably four feet square. Pallets of the cardboard would be fed into large color printing presses where the designs for boxes would be printed and the outlines of the boxes scored. It was a marvelous process, as the sheets would go from one pallet through the press and be precisely loaded on a second pallet. Once printed and scored, “strippers” (employees with jackhammers with sharp blades) would trim the boxes and discard the selvage. The flat boxes would be moved to the shipping area and ultimately packaged for transport to the end-user.
Although Ft. Orange had several customers for whom it manufactured boxes, I only remember three: Chiclets boxes that held 2 Chiclets for vending machines, Hartz Mountain birdseed boxes, and Knox Gelatin boxes.
George and I started out on the day shift, working on Knox Gelatin boxes. These boxes, about the size of today’s Jello boxes, were brought to us on pallets. We had workstations across from each other, sort of like a partner’s desk. A pallet of Knox boxes would be placed on one side of both of us, and an empty pallet on the other side. Although the strippers had removed the selvage, there were 2 parts of the boxes that were scored, but too small to be removed with the jackhammers. One was a slot about 2 inches long and about 1/4 inch wide. The other was an area shaped like one-half of an arrowhead. Our job was to pick up a handful of the boxes, place them in a special wooden jig that had similarly shaped holes in the bottom, and then knock out those scored pieces with a mallet and slender chisel. It was tedious work, but not particularly hard. We were pretty much left alone after we showed competence in the work, and we could talk as we worked. After a few days, George was taken off that job and given other duties. I was left to continue with the Knox boxes. They had a picture of a cow in the center of a circle, and most of the box was greenish-yellow. With George on another job, I had no one to talk to, and I developed a rhythm; pick up a handful of boxes, put them in the jig, hammer the slot and the half arrow, put them on the other pallet, and start over again. After I had been doing this for a couple of days, the shop foreman came to me and asked if I knew how many boxes I had finished that shift. I told him that I didn’t keep track, but apparently, he did. He said that I had done approximately 22,000 boxes so far and that the previous record for a complete shift was a little over 18,000 boxes. He said, “You’re going back to college in a little while, but management will expect the regular guys to keep up that production.” He said that he was going to mark my day’s work at 16,000 boxes and that I should “go read some magazines.” I went to the large shed where the magazines and papers awaiting recycling were stored and read magazines. After that, whenever I worked on the Knox boxes, I would punch 15,000 or so and then go and read magazines for the rest of my shift.
After a while, George and I were put on the evening shift, midnight to 8 am. That worked out well for us. We would go swimming in the Valatiekill near Castleton in the late afternoon and usually stop at a bar in Castleton to shoot darts, have a sandwich, and a couple of beers before going to work. (The legal age for alcohol was still 18 at the time).
Eventually, George and I were assigned to feed cardboard into a big four-color press that was printing Hartz Mountain Bird Seed Food boxes. We would together lift a stack of blank sheets of cardboard into the press. The sheets would then be lifted, one by one, into the press by a mechanical arm that grabbed each sheet, and moved it into the press. We became a little sloppy in feeding the press, and as a result, the mechanical arm once picked up two or three sheets instead of just one. The extra thickness of the multiple sheets of cardboard jammed the press and misaligned the plates. It took a couple of days to get the press running properly again since a repairman had to be brought in from the printing press factory to get it printing properly again. The job at Ft. Orange ended just before Labor Day weekend when I returned to college. Years later the company went into bankruptcy.
I came home at the end of my sophomore year at Syracuse University. One evening, shortly after my return, I told my parents that I was meeting two high school friends, Bob Stewart and John Weaver and that I would be home by 10:00 p.m. After I met Bob and John, we went to a bar in Rensselaer where we drank some beer and started shooting darts. We were having a good time, and before we knew it, it was after 1:00 a.m. and the bar was closing, so we left.
When I got home, I was surprised to see that the lights were still on in Jack's Place, and I went in to see why. Both of my parents were there, and my father was on the telephone. They had been calling my friends' parents, the State Police, and were getting ready to call hospitals since they were sure that something terrible had happened. My explanation infuriated my father, and he announced that from then on, I would have to be home by 10:00 p.m. or I would have to move out of the house.
The next day I drove over to Camp Nassau, a children's boarding summer camp about five miles from home. Camp Nassau was owned by the Krouner family and formerly had been a summer vacation destination, known as Krouners' Hotel, which had catered to Jewish families, mainly from New York City. The facility was about ten miles from Albany. The Krouners knew my family, and their daughter, Risa, had been in kindergarten and first grade with me at the Nassau Elementary School before they moved to Albany. [Camp Nassau was initially operated by Ben Becker. The following year he re-established Camp Nassau in Guilderland, Albany County, and the Krouner family continued the original facility as Camp Schodack.)
I saw Lou Krouner and asked if he had any job openings, thinking that perhaps I could get a job as a counselor. There were no counselor jobs open, but Lou asked if I would want to work doing such things as driving the van to Albany to pick up groceries, pick up campers at the bus or train station, and mow the lawns with a tractor. I don't recall the wages, but the job included room and board. I bunked with the counselors and went to social events. I had my own car there, and some evenings I would drive into Albany with some camp counselors and pick up submarine sandwiches at Mike's Subs on Central Avenue and State Street. Sometimes I would take the naive counselors on a tour of Green Street or Dongan in Avenue, Albany's notorious red-light district, where the ladies of the night would approach the car with their propositions or call out from windows with invites such as, "Come up and let me fuck your big cock."
It was an enjoyable summer. I would occasionally stop at home and see my parents. When the camp was over shortly before the fall semester started, I came home and observed the 10:00 p.m. curfew.
Following my junior year at college, I didn't get a job. I was required to go to the Army ROTC summer camp at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, for six weeks, which made a summer job opportunity impractical. Instead, before and after the ROTC camp I worked in Jack's Place just as I had done during summer vacations when I was in public school.
Growing Tomatos in Florida
My uncle Eddie was a full-time farmer. A bachelor for most of his life, he didn't own a home. Most years, he boarded with my uncle Max or with my uncle Harry during the vegetable growing season in upstate New York. Eddie didn't like winter, and at the end of the farming season, he usually drove his gray Hudson pickup truck to Florida.
Note Marking Periods 3 & 4 |
Wednesday, June 01, 2022
My First Date
The first date I ever had was in the spring of 1952 when I was 14 years old. The previous winter my parents and I were in Miami Beach during Christmas vacation and we stayed at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive, I believe around 8thstreet. My parents met another couple from Albany, Mr. and Mrs. Schneerson. They were staying at the Colony Hotel, just up the street. They had a daughter, Sandra, who was slightly older than me. Sandra was a student at Albany High School and was also a freshman. The Schneersons lived on Myrtle Avenue, near Albany Medical Center. I had some minimal contact with Sandra, who was always present with her parents when we all sat around on the hotel porch.
Sometime that spring, I showed my aunt Sue a photo of Sandra that I had taken, and Sue prodded me into calling her for a date. It was awkward for me, particularly since I was too young to drive and lived 16 miles from Albany. I could only get to Albany by taking a bus or hitchhiking.
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Superman and Nedda in One Evening!
I had a date for New Year’s Eve with some coed from Syracuse that I knew slightly. We were to double date with another couple from college. As I was leaving the Di Lido to pick up my date, I met Bob Penn, a classmate, who was standing in the hotel lobby. I asked him what he was doing at the hotel, and he said that he was picking up his date, a girl from New York City, who was staying at the Di Lido with her parents. We discussed a threatened airline strike, which was threatened for January second or third. I hadn’t given much thought to the possibility of a strike because I was planning to drive back to Syracuse with a couple of friends who were in Miami Beach for the game. Bob mentioned to me that when he met his date’s parents, her father had told him that if any of the students were stranded because of the strike, he would have room to take one person back in the family car. Just as he told me that, he pointed to the stairway where Nedda was descending to meet him and said that she was his date. I looked at her and told Bob that I thought I would be stranded by the airline strike and could use the ride to New York. He briefly introduced me to Nedda and told her that I needed a ride to New York. She gave me her family’s room number and left with Bob. I went on to pick up my date.
New Year’s Eve was spent with my date and the other couple in one of Miami Beach’s many nightclubs. It was a usual New Year’s Eve for the times: drinking, smoking, and dancing in a smoke-filled nightclub. The highlight of the evening was when we realized that an intoxicated gentleman at the bar was George Reeves, the actor who played Superman in the television series that had been very popular in the early 1950s. Although we were quite certain of his identity, he removed all doubt when, with a drunken smile, he loosened his tie, and opened his shirt to reveal the Superman top he was wearing beneath his suit. [Mr. Reeves was found dead of a bullet wound less than six months later, the cause of which remains an unsolved mystery.]
Although I was somewhat shy, I went to meet Nedda’s parents the next day and told them that I would certainly appreciate a ride to New York since the airline strike was becoming more certain. Although I had a tentative date for that evening with my New Year’s Eve date, I invited Nedda to go out that evening, and then canceled my tentative date with the co-ed, whose identity I have no present recollection of. I think that I took Nedda to a movie and purposely didn’t try to give her a good night kiss because I thought it would be very awkward if she were to be offended by a good night kiss on the first date. [Remember, it was the 50s!] I knew that Nedda was a high school senior, but she said that she was eighteen. A couple of months later I learned that she had recently turned sixteen.
January 1959 |
The following morning I said goodbye to my parents and Sylvia and met Nedda and her parents for an early morning start for our road trip to New York. It was a harrowing experience. I sat in the back seat of the family sedan with Nedda. She had her hair in curlers for most of the trip. She read magazines, chewed bubble gum, and chatted. Her father, Marty, drove like a maniac, and I doubted I would survive the trip. I frequently
Spring Weekend 1959 |
offered to drive, but he insisted on driving the whole trip himself. I remember crouching in the back seat while he drove through a late-night torrential rainstorm, passing slow-moving cars on a two-lane Georgia highway. I made no obvious headway with Nedda during that trip, being more concerned with staying alive. When her parents dropped me off at Grand Central Station in New York City where I could catch a train back to Syracuse, I had not even thought to get Nedda's address or telephone number. A few days later, when the terror of the road trip had faded, I called Bob Penn to find out if he had her address. He was reluctant to give it to me, but relented when I told him that I wanted to write a thank you note to her parents. Instead, I wrote to Nedda, and at the semester’s end in late January I drove to New York City for another date. During the following weeks, we corresponded frequently and she flew to Syracuse for Spring Weekend as I was able to arrange for her to stay at a dormitory. After that weekend, I never dated anyone else.
Friday, April 01, 2022
My Military Service
As a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant, 1959
ROTC
When I started college at Syracuse University in the fall of 1955, I could sign up for either physical education or Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Syracuse offered both Air Force ROTC and Army ROTC. There were two excellent reasons for me to choose ROTC: First, I never was very athletic, and the physical education classes didn't appeal to me; second, in 1955, there was Universal Military Training, which meant that all physically able males were supposed to serve either two years of active military service plus six years of inactive reserve service, or six months of active military service for training (ACDUTRA) followed by seven and one-half years of active reserve service. I knew that it would be much better to perform my service as an officer rather than in an enlisted status. Although I would have preferred to be in the Air Force ROTC, that service was looking for potential pilots, and my myopia disqualified me from the program. The initial ROTC commitment was for two years, the "basic" ROTC program. We were furnished with a homely brown wool uniform, consisting of a shirt, black tie, black shoes, greenish-brown pants, an "Eisenhower" jacket, a flat-folding cap, technically known as an "overseas" cap, but more commonly known as a "cunt cap," and a brown overcoat for winter wear. It was essentially an Army private's uniform. There was a shoulder patch and round brass insignia that identified us as ROTC students.
Every Tuesday and Thursday were drill days. ROTC students were required to wear uniforms on drill days and attend an hour of classroom instruction in military science and tactics, plus an hour of military drill. The drill was held on an athletic field in good weather and in a large field house in inclement weather. ROTC was a large program at Syracuse, and classes were held in a drab grey building devoted exclusively to the program. All of the instructors were active-duty Army officers, and the head of the program, a lieutenant colonel, was the Professor of Military Science and Tactics. The academic courses were monotonous but did not require any real class preparation, and I don't recall any homework or assignments.
The drill was more difficult. We were each furnished with a copy of the Army's drill manual, FM 22-5, which had instructions and how-to photographs on marching with and without a rifle. Drills were chaotic. Except for a few freshmen who had attended military high schools and a couple of first-year students who had served in the Army, most of us had no idea how to drill or march. Unlike soldiers in boot camp, who were taught by very experienced drill sergeants, our instructors were just upper-class ROTC students who had very little training themselves. The entire Army ROTC was called the battalion, and the top senior ROTC cadet became the battalion commander. The battalion was divided into five or six companies, which consisted of five platoons. The platoons were divided into five squads, each having six to ten members, depending on the total number of ROTC cadets. My squad leader, a sophomore chemistry major named Stan, was not proficient in drill himself. It was a struggle the first year to learn how to move correctly to the commands, but eventually, I could "dress, right, dress," "left face," "right face," "about-face," "present arms," "left turn, harch," "to the rear, harch," etc. [Note: for some reason, the word "march" was always pronounced "harch" in the Army.] In addition to the battalion staff, other seniors were company commanders or platoon leaders. Syracuse's star football hero, Jimmy Brown, was a company commander, but he frequently couldn't find his company and would wander about until some other senior led to the front of his company. Juniors and seniors were in the advanced ROTC and wore officers' uniforms. In the mid-1950s, the Army was switching from World War II-era style uniforms to a new style. The officers' Class A "pinks and greens," which were quite dashing, gave way to the all-green uniforms which, we were told, were supposed to more closely resemble a business suit.
Military protocol was followed on campus, and all of the ROTC students were continually saluting each other as they went from class to class across the campus. Only seniors became cadet officers. Instead of regular Army insignia of rank, cadets had silver circles or diamonds. A cadet second lieutenant had one dime-size circle; a first lieutenant had two, and a captain three. A major had one diamond, a lieutenant colonel had two, and a full colonel had three diamonds. There were no cadet generals. My freshman year squad leader, Stan, didn't elect to sign up for the advance ROTC in his junior year, and he would sometimes heckle me with a salute and a command when we passed on campus on a drill day.
At the start of my junior year, I signed up for the advanced ROTC. My mother was very upset, as she hated anything to do with war or the military. From my point of view, ROTC was an easy three credit hours each semester, and the advanced ROTC contract that we signed provided for payment of 90 cents per day during the school year. Juniors were issued brand new green officers' uniforms. Unlike the class that preceded us, which got new green uniforms like those issued to enlisted men, we were furnished with new high-quality officers' uniforms to be retained for our active duty service.
The highlight of advanced ROTC was the six weeks summer camp held between the junior and senior years. Syracuse University ROTC students were sent to summer camp at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, one of several Army ROTC summer camps held throughout the United States. There were probably a couple of thousand cadets at the camp from many colleges. Cadets were housed in large open two-story barracks by platoons. The platoon leaders were all active-duty first lieutenants or captains, and the company commanders were full colonels. Cadets seemed to be randomly assigned to platoons, and I was the only Syracuse cadet in my platoon. Only four of us in our platoon were from northern colleges. The rest were from southern colleges such as the Citadel, Clemson, Wake Forrest, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, and the University of Virginia. We started with one Black cadet, Hadley, from Ohio, but the southerners made him so unwelcome that he requested a transfer and was reassigned to another platoon with several other Black cadets. Gus Henning, a cadet from Michigan, whose cot had been next to Hadley's cot (we slept in alphabetical order), had tried to be friendly with Hadley, and as a result, awoke on a Sunday morning (when we could sleep late) to find that some southern cadets had painted his scrotum with liquid black shoe polish. After Hadley left, the only northerners were me, Gus Henning, and a cadet from Cornell, whose name escapes me. In the photo below, I am directly behind Hadley. Gus Henning is to my right. I am behind Hadley.
The southerners had an entirely different outlook on the ROTC program from us northerners. Most of the southerners relished the idea of military service, and many hoped to make it a career. The top ten percent of the ROTC class in each college were designated Distinguished Military Students and became eligible to receive regular Army commissions instead of reserve commissions. That was a goal that made some cadets very competitive. Our platoon leader was a regular Army first lieutenant who had graduated from some land grant college in the south.
Fort Bragg in July was not a pleasant place. It was sweltering, humid, and buggy. Part of our routine was to check each other for ticks when we returned to the barracks from the field. If we saw a tick with its head burrowed under the skin, we would hold a cigarette close to it until the heat made it back out so that it could be safely removed. Spider bites were worse. There were tiny brown spiders. I had a spider bite on my left wrist that was not only painful and itchy for several days, but the bite marks were visible for several months.
Although much of summer camp was hellish, it was not hell. I got a helicopter ride and shot a 3.5 rocket launcher, or bazooka as it was commonly called. I learned to iron clothing and disassemble and assemble my M-1 rifle. I also learned a lot about the attitudes of my southern contemporaries.
One day in mid-July, our scheduled training was abruptly canceled. We were loaded into trucks and driven to a training field, where we were seated in bleachers. Colonel Sam Razor, the ROTC summer camp commander, told us that the Marines had just invaded Lebanon and possibly the United States might be engaged in a war there. He then advised us that the contract we had signed for the advanced ROTC program provided that in a national emergency, the Secretary of the Army could elect to commission us at the conclusion of summer camp and order us to immediate active duty. Fortunately, the invasion of Lebanon did not escalate into a war.
Toward the end of summer camp, all of the cadets went on a three or four-day bivouac to expose us to simulated warfare. I went to the morning sick call just before leaving to get medicine for some cold-like symptoms that I had, and the medic gave me several bottles of the elixir of Turpin hydrate with codeine to take with me on bivouac. When we were about to start our long march to the bivouac area, our platoon leader told the Cornell cadet, Gus Henning, and me that we were the "platoon fuck ups," and he was assigning us to carry the 81 mm. mortar and its very heavy base plate. We struggled with it for perhaps a mile when some full colonel on the camp commander's staff rode by in a jeep and spotted us. He said that the mortar was too heavy to be carried any distance and told us to put it in the following truck to take us to the bivouac area, which we happily did. A couple of hours later, when our platoon arrived, we were sitting under a tree with our mortar, playing cards, and smoking. Our platoon leader never mentioned it, and I believe he was reprimanded for ordering us to carry the mortar. The bivouac was otherwise uneventful, and I enjoyed my medicine, which was commonly known as "GI gin."
Shortly before the end of summer camp, the Cornell cadet, Gus Henning, and I were each summoned to the company commander's office, and each told the same thing by our colonel. He said that based upon the report of our platoon leader, we would not be recommended for a commission in one of the combat arms: infantry, artillery, or armor. For a cadet hoping to make a career in the military, such news would have been devastating; for us, it was great news.
ACTIVE DUTY
During the second semester of my senior year, I received notice that I would be assigned to the Army's Adjutant General Corps. The Adjutant General's Corps was the branch of the Army that handled its administration and postal functions. I received written orders to report to the Adjutant General's School at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana, in mid-July to start my six months of active duty for training. I graduated from Syracuse University on June 1, 1959, and the Professor of Military Scient and Tactics pinned gold bars on my new summer uniform.
There were 40 newly commissioned second lieutenants assigned to Officers Basic Course #2. We were each assigned a private room in the bachelor officers' quarters and were delighted to learn that we had maid service. The first two or three days were spent at the offices' club pool and buying short-sleeved summer khaki uniforms. One of the lieutenants from Texas, Homer Lee Tumlinson, brought Air Force khakis, which were a lighter shade than the Army khakis, but no one seemed to mind his individuality. Fort Benjamin Harrison, or "Uncle Benny's Rest Home" as it was commonly referred to, was the home of the Adjutant General's Corps and the Finance Corps. It had a very laid-back atmosphere. Most physicians and dentists assigned to the post medical facility wore regulation uniforms but spiffed them with penny loafers or tassel loafers. The father of one lieutenant owned a jewelry company, and he had all of his brass gold plated.
The first phase of our course consisted of a couple of months of classroom instruction about the Army in general and the function of the Adjutant General Corps in particular. The AG school was in a modern brick building. Each student officer had a large office-style desk, and enlisted men arranged our books on our desks each day. Most of the classwork consisted of listening to lectures and occasional quizzes. Our classes started at 8:00 am with a ten-minute break every hour. After an hour and one half lunch break, we usually had another three hours of class and were done for the day. At one point, one of the school's instructors asked for a show of hands of all in the class who had not been through an infiltration course. We all raised our hands, but we were never put through any outdoor training. I never wore a fatigue uniform or handled a weapon once during my six months at Ft. Benjamin Harrison.
At the conclusion of the basic course, we were given a choice to take advanced training in either military postal service or data processing. These courses were taught as a mixed class of officers and enlisted men. The instruction was designed to educate the enlisted men who would work in these fields, mostly 18 to 20-year-old recent high school graduates. The lieutenants, all recent college graduates, found the work very easy. The enlisted men had a real \incentive to succeed – they were threatened with a transfer to an infantry unit in Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri if they failed. In 1959 the Army used large punch-card data processing machines since the computer age had not yet arrived. At the conclusion of the course, I received the military occupational specialty (MOS) of a machine records unit officer.
At the conclusion of the formal instruction, we were given a couple of weeks' leave. Upon our return, we found that the Army had no actual plans for us. Typically, we would have been sent to different military posts for the remainder of our six months of active duty, but we were told that there were too many lieutenants and not enough funds to justify our reassignment so that we would just spend the rest of our time at Uncle Benny's Rest Home. For our morning's work, we were given an empty classroom and told to take correspondence courses. No one monitored our work, and we could choose our courses and work at whatever pace we chose. For many, it became a morning card game, and some married officers who lived off the post just didn't show up for several days at a time. We were encouraged to find something useful to do in the afternoon, but it was not required. I took photographs for the public information office and later filled in as Assistant Post Adjutant. That job entailed scribbling my name on about 100 different routine documents each afternoon.
One memorable occasion occurred while I was walking near the post medical facility. An enlisted man walking towards me saluted as we passed, and we suddenly recognized each other and stopped. It was Stan. He had graduated from Syracuse University the previous year and started working for a drug company as a chemist when he was drafted. The Army didn't need chemists that year, so he was assigned to be a clerk typist in the post pharmacy. Stan almost cried when he saw me, and it made all of the ROTC Mickey-Mouse drills worthwhile.
When we were not in class or otherwise engaged, we could leave the post and go wherever we wished. We were told just to sign out and put the letters "VOCO" next to our signatures. The VOCO stood for "verbal order, commanding officer." Lt. Josef Levi, an artist, signed himself out and went to Spain for a couple of days after learning that a particular type of art was inexpensively available at a bazaar near Madrid. One weekend Dick Bryan, who grew up in Nevada (and later became its Attorney General, Governor, and United States Senator), wanted to see New York City. I called Nedda and told her I was coming in for the weekend with a friend. Dick and I put on our Class A uniforms and drove to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where we boarded an Air Force Reserve flight to Mitchell Field, not too far from where Nedda lived with her parents in Queens. We spent the weekend there and flew back on Sunday night.
I liked the Army. After living as a college student for four years, I enjoyed having a decent paycheck, maid service, congenial company, easy work, and the prestige of being an officer. Also, I had nothing better to do. I thought it would be great to extend my time on active duty and see some of the world. I asked the Commandant of the AG school if I could extend my tour of duty, indicating that I would be willing to accept a posting to any foreign military post, including Korea, but he told me that there were so many AG second lieutenants previously committed to a two-year tour of duty, or who had regular Army commissions, that I would need the backing of at least a United States senator to get an extension.
THE RESERVES
Under the Reserve Forces Act of 1955, I had an eight-year military reserve obligation which commenced with my commissioning on June 1, 1959. During the spring of 1960, I was assigned to an Army Reserve Postal Unit in Troy. It was the smaller of two postal units in Troy and was commanded by First Lieutenant Richard Hathaway. Lt. Hathaway was an older man, not too tall and with a wiry frame. He had served in an airborne ranger unit in World War II and Korea. He had been a sergeant in both wars and only reluctantly accepted a battlefield commission shortly before leaving active service in Korea. He loved the Army, and during our two-week summer camp at Camp Drum in Watertown, NY, he enjoyed the role of a soldier. On a night bivouac, he told his men that he would play the enemy and to be on the lookout for him. He would crawl up the hill in the dark and silently capture men half his age and twice his weight, pulling them out of their foxholes with his hand clasped over their mouths. Although hard liquor was not permitted on bivouac, Lt. Hathaway said that even the Army Military Police weren't permitted to search U.S. Post Office mail sacks, and on a day when the weather prediction was for a cold night, he took a mail sack into Watertown and brought back bottles of liquor, from which he offered his troops a shot at night to ward off the cold.
Shortly after entering law school that fall, I requested relief from attending weekly reserve meetings and was assigned to a "control group." Instead of weekly meetings, I took correspondence courses and was subject to being called to a two-week summer camp. After I got married, between my first and second year of law school, Nedda took over the correspondence courses for me so that I wasn't distracted from my law studies. Nedda would tell me all about the different weapons systems she had studied.
I spent the first summer camp at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, where I shared a room in the BOQ with an electrical engineer from Binghamton, NY, who worked for IBM designing the same type of IBM punch card data processing equipment used at Ft. Dix. Ironically, he was not permitted to touch the equipment since he did not have the proper machine records unit officer MOS, and the Army considered him a civil engineer. At the time, Ft. Dix was the headquarters of II Corps, which encompassed all Army reserve units and individual Army reservists in the northeast. Among the interesting things I learned from the head civilian bureaucrat who ran this section was that when the Korean War broke out, there was such chaos that privates were deciding which reserve officers to call to active duty. The unit would receive a list of officer ranks with specific MOS qualifications that the Army needed, and the privates, who were usually doing file maintenance, would look through the files and choose the reservists to send to war.
Following graduation from law school, I was assigned to the 364th General Hospital Unit in Albany. This was a large reserve unit that had no need for an Adjutant General officer, so I did a variety of training jobs. One summer, I was sent to Camp Drum in upstate New York and was put in charge of the ration breakdown warehouse, which provided the food for all the reserve and National Guard units for the two-week summer camp. It was the summer that I was learning to fly, and I supplied an Air National Guard unit from Connecticut with extra steaks for a barbeque in return for lessons flying the small, two-seat observation airplanes, known as the L-19 Bird Dog.
At the end of May 1967, my eight-year military obligation expired. I was considering extending my time in the reserves, but Viet Nam had started pressuring the Army to activate some reserve units. At my last meeting that May, I was told that an Army reserve general hospital somewhere in the United States would be activated the next day, but the unit's name had not yet been announced. Although I was scheduled to be promoted to the rank of captain at the next weekly meeting, I didn't want to take the chance of being activated, and I typed a letter resigning my commission. I also typed similar letters for two other officers. As it turned out, the Albany unit was not called to duty.
Now, many years later, I find that my military service entitles me to a 10% discount on purchases made at Lowes and a "Thank you for your military service" from the cashiers when I check out.