In March, ’53, I requested a voluntary drafting into the Army. I knew that my college deferral was up because I had completed my class work, and it was silly looking for a job when I was going to be drafted. I thought it would be easier to get on with my life this way. I went to Camp Breckenridge for 16 weeks of Basic Training as an infantryman.
Basic Training was very difficult, very physical and demanding. I was in good condition, so it didn’t bother me, but it did for some guys. A bunch were from the Bayou country, in Louisiana. I don’t think they’d seen neckties before. When they got dressed up for parade, we had to tie their neckties for them!
It was quite a different group; I don’t know how else to describe them. I managed to get along; there was only one other college graduate, and another had a year or two of college. For the most part I was older; I was 23, but most had been drafted at 18.
An interesting point: I think all the Blacks in my Basic Training unit went to Korea or the Far East, and the whites went to Europe. I think one or two of them went to Officers’ Training School or trained to be a non-commissioned officer. But most of them ended up as infantrymen.
I met with the Chaplain because I wanted to get my IBM experience into my records, to get out of the infantry. Because of that meeting, I was able to get an assignment as an IBM specialist. There were four places where I could be assigned: Fort Monmouth (NJ), Hawaii, and Germany.
One of Jo Anne’s roommates knew somebody in the Personnel Department at Camp Breckenridge, so when the assignments came up, he looked at which would be closest to Boston, where Jo Anne was. This was, of course New Jersey, so I ended up at Fort Monmouth. This was the end of the Korean War; I think the war ended about a week before I finished Basic Training.
Ft. Monmouth proved to be a big surprise to me. I had been sent there to be an accounting machine operator, but the General there had the habit of meeting the incoming troops – those going to Signal School – which was basically what Ft. Monmouth was at that point. If you knew the ropes, you knew that the General would interview those sitting in the first two rows after the orientation.
These kids form New York knew the ropes, and one of them got my job as an IBM specialist, and somebody else got the job as Post Controller, and I ended up in a different department – I don’t even remember what it was. The guy who got the job with the Post Controller was a Jewish fellow, and his family had a lot of stores. I went in to the Controller and said that that other guy had never done any auditing, but there was a guy in the other department who was an auditor (me!), and right off the bat I was changed. I had never done any auditing in my life! I had had some accounting courses in college, but auditing wasn’t one of them.
I eventually became a CPA without ever having had a course in auditing, although when I was with Price Waterhouse, they sent me to Chicago for two months, at which point I learned a lot about auditing. But that was not at the time. In the Army I learned on the job, and actually it was quite simple. We were auditing unit funds, which were funds that each company was responsible for, and were used to keep the morale of the troops up. It wasn’t that hard, but it was still a little intimidating to go into different company offices, being a Private and telling a Captain that I was there to audit his funds. Mostly, though I dealt with the Sergeant. The work was sort of boring but so be it. I was not excused from duty, so I had my share of K.P. and garbage duty and watch. The only time I ever pulled Guard Duty was when there were storms, and they were afraid the classrooms might catch on fire, so we were out in the lousy weather, keeping an eye on the rooms. If we were smart, we managed to duck into the furnace rooms for a little bit and get warm. It wasn’t fun.
Fort Monmouth and the missing money
For history buffs, I was at Ft. Monmouth during the McCarthy hearing, and he was accusing Ft. Monmouth of being a hot bed of Communists – I had no idea, but this sort of got me involved in politics. We weren’t affected, but it was in the news.
At this time there was a shortage at the Officers’ Club, and it was part of my duty to figure out what was going on. The way the liquor was handled was that the officers would buy a book of coupons and use them to get drinks at the bars, because the bars did not handle cash. They came up with a big shortage of money at the Officers’ Club. It just so happened that the officer in charge of the Officers’ Club was also in charge of all the troops, so my civilian boss in the Controller’s office worked out a deal whereby I would spend my spare time working on this and be excused from all company duty such as K.P., and so forth. I ended up working three or four nights a week, getting more money for this. The pay for a Private First Class was about $53 a month or somewhere around there, and I got paid $90 a month to work on the liquor shortage, so the extra money was welcome.
The Post Controller was a civilian, a Navy Veteran. He was hoping to be a major league pitcher but lost part of a finger of his throwing arm, so his hopes were dashed by that. Because of my involvement in this audit, I sort of had a free hand; I milked it for whatever I could. We didn’t find the missing money, but what we did find was that the bartenders were overreporting the coupons and maybe making off with some bottles of liquor. We never could prove anything. We did a lot of testing, but never found anyone we could blame it on. There was supposed to be someone who counted the chits, but he was transferred out and they never did fill the position, so nobody was ever checking. It was very sloppy.
Army Chemical Center: My last months of service
I was at Ft. Monmouth for about fourteen or fifteen months, and by this time I had risen to the rank of Corporal, which was nice, but I knew that in a headquarters company there were a lot of Army regulars were there, and any further promotions were out of the question, because we had many, many Sergeants already in the company. There were two enlisted men working for the Post Controller, and one of us was going to be reassigned, and since one was married and had his wife with him, I elected to be the one that was transferred. So I went to the Army Chemical Center just outside of Baltimore for the last four months of my service. I was supposed to sort the classified information from the unclassified. I was given top-secret clearance.
While I was there I earned my rocker – became a Sergeant – I think at that point Jo Anne was not in Boston. I figured it was no harder to get to Cincinnati from Baltimore than from New Jersey. Once I made a trip on a three-day pass with a guy who had a car and was going to Dayton; we drove all night on Friday night. Jo Anne met me in Dayton and brought me back to Cincinnati. And on Sunday I met him, and we went back to camp.
It’s amazing what could be accomplished – it was illegal, but I had a three-day pass which started on Wednesday so with the weekend I had a five-day pass. It depended on your relationship with the company Sergeant, because he was the one who gave out the passes. It wasn’t hard to get a weekend pass at all, because no one was needed on the weekend. Sometimes you had to wait until noon on Saturday because there was a parade on Saturday morning.
I had my first pizza in Long Branch N.J., where we’d go on Monday nights, which were K-ration nights. We’d go to the package store, get a bottle of Chianti, go across the street to the Pizza Parlor and get a pizza – my introduction to pizza. To this day sausage and green pepper is still my favorite.
I got an early discharge from the Army about two months early so I could go back to school. It meant that I had a longer Reserve time added on, but I was lucky, it was all inactive Reserves, and I never had to do anything with it. But I was always scared that something would happen, and I would be called up. I was very happy when that eight-year period passed.
I learned a lot from the army, and I matured while I was there.
The Felson Family 