This is a clipping that my mother kept. I was inducted with James Scott and we were both sent to Camp Fannin in Texas for infantry training. At the beginning of training, the Army asked each inductee what their interests were. I put down "model airplanes and baseball", and ended up in the armored infantry and was shipped to Europe. James put down "radio" and they sent him to San Diego for training as a radio technician, and he never got shipped out at all. The funny part of this was that by "radio" James meant that he listened to the radio, like we all did, not that he knew anything about them. After the war James lived in Renton and passed away in 2002.
Lowell Tuft was a friend in training. Here he is in a training uniform in Camp Fannin.
This is also Jim Scott outside our dorm room at Texas A&M, where we studied engineering as part of the Army Specialized Training program, which in my opinion was a program to train huge numbers of people in the infantry to warehouse them in preparation for the invasion. I think it was a scam to get people into the infantry because no one would join up, if they were in their right mind. But through the AST they promised that they give you a high level of training, and I got a letter saying that I had qualified for this training, which is why I ended up at Texas A&M. However, they abandoned the program in the spring of 1944, a few months before D-Day, and everyone was sent to Europe.
This is Elvin Waldof, John Tedrow, and myself in a bar (I think) in Abilene, Texas. Its a staged picture, we're on a pass to town for the evening. We're wearing 12th armored patches, we're all privates. This is probably mid-summer 1944. "El" passed away in 2005. John was in the Korean War, and married and lives in Stone Mountain Georgia.
This is another weekend in Abilene. I'd ridden a little bit on my sister's horses before I'd left Seattle, so I knew how to ride.
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