Written and manual exams and physical fitness were also scheduled to determine our qualifications to enter advanced trade schools. Once there, we joined another group of recruits to form a company of 110 individuals––Company 122––to be billeted in large wooden barracks where a chief petty officer and two lower ranked petty officers processed us, read us some of the Navy regulations, and assigned us to lockers and bunks. Naval Training Center near North Chicago, a distance of 60-plus miles. Then, early Monday morning, December 2, a bus drove us from Aurora to the Great Lakes U.S.
We were allowed to return home for the Thanksgiving dinner weekend. This Depression-era kid stood at five feet, six inches tall and weighed a skinny 127 pounds. Since some of us were not 18 years old, parents had to sign for us with their approval. It was Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1940-almost a full year before Pearl Harbor.Īpplicants had to have been United States citizens between the ages of 17 and 31 and needed to meet the Navy’s physical standards.
After graduating from high school at age 17 (the only one of six siblings in my family to do so), several of us 17- and 18-year-old kids went down to the recruiting substation in Aurora, Illinois, and enlisted in the U.S. I am of Polish, Irish, and American Indian descent and grew up in the small (population 3,800) northern Illinois town of Geneva.
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