Kathleen was on Ancestry today and clicked on a link she had not noticed that connected military documents with my father's general information. They are scans of the original small cards that were filled in by hand, but are filled with interesting information.
Oh dear, you are thinking. "Interesting" is part of the curse: "May you live in interesting times." We are currently living in "interesting times," so I get it. But it's my blog...
The first of the two documents is dad's original selective service registration card, which was dated Sept. 6, 1946, just two days after his 18th birthday. His address was RFD #3, Iowa City, so he was still living on the farm. He was listed as a student at State University of Iowa. SUI changed to the University of Iowa in 1964, which I had to look up, but I do remember WSUI, the campus radio station that still operates on 910 AM.
That station was the NPR outlet that I regularly chose to play when ferrying children around town in my car. "Oh no! Not AM radio!" they would complain. Their preference would have been KRNA, our local rock station.
His phone number was "18 F 11" and that is both interesting and mysterious. Not sure exactly how that was dialed or if the operator had to make that connection.
On the back of the card was a physical description. Dad was listed at 6 feet, 190 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair. His complexion was listed as "Ruddy." Other options included sallow, light, dark, freckled, light brown, dark brown, and black. I don't recall ever thinking of dad as being "reddish" or "rosy," but he was just out of high school, or maybe Margarite Gatens, the Johnson County registrar who signed the form, was just bored.
The second document Kathleen found is his updated registration card, from Sept. 13, 1948. "Complexion" was no longer a category on the form, but he had grown an inch and gained tn pounds. His mailing address was listed as 528 Iowa Avenue, despite the fact that he was living in Freeport, working in advertising for the Freeport Journal Standard newspaper.
We were between wars at the time and the WWII draft expired in 1947. I had to look this up, but during the roughly one-year "draft holiday" that followed, the United States relied on voluntary enlistments. However, due to dwindling enlistment numbers and escalating Cold War tensions, President Harry S. Truman signed the new Selective Service Act of 1948 in June 1948, which officially reinstated the peacetime draft. Recent Iowa grad John Kennedy had to register once again.
He joined the Illinois National Guard 66th Fighter Wing as a private on June 23, 1948, and he may have gone to basic training that summer, though I have only the faintest memories of anyone ever talking about this. It will take more research to discover how long he was in the National Guard, but he was never called up to active duty.
The 66th Fighter Wing was not activated between 1950 and 1952; instead, it was inactivated on October 31, 1950, and folded into the new U.S. Air Force. It might have helped that he was the father of two children by May of 1952, of course, and there was a deferment for fathers. But I found that President Eisenhower changed the Class III deferment in 1953, and the new requirement was to show that your induction would cause extreme and harmful financial damage to your family.
I don't know if he ever had to argue his case, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have much money in the early '50s.
Final thought for today: In an earlier post I wrote that 528 Iowa Avenue was purchased in 1950 by Grandpa from Emma Dunkel, widow of the previous owner. That remains true, but the 1948 document indicates that the family was occupying that house prior to September of 1948. Maybe renting?
Every time I think I have found "the truth," I am disabused of that notion. But I will carry on with my family history musings and explorations. You have been warned.
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