Shortsightedness Was No Obstacle!

Well after two years, the situation for volunteers was getting very tight. They were hard to get with casualties being so heavy and everything else, and the university said when you got towards the end of the year, anybody that had completed the year’s work that were in the services or anything would be given their year. Well that was fine. So on the last Monday in March of 1916, we were eligible to take our classes and somebody said I guess it was time we went down to enlist and seven of us went down to enlist. We had already talked over what we were going to be. We didn’t, definitely didn’t want to be in the infantry and we thought, you know, being engineers and the like of that we would be more useful someplace else. It wasn’t a matter of ducking the thing or anything, it was just a matter of where we could be the most use so we decided on the Signal Corp. There was a story about that is I’m short-sighted and you had to have 20- 40 vision to get in there. And the other six guys all filled a crew and they examined me and the officer says, “I can’t pass you!” This was a dirty, rainy morning on a Monday, he says, “Come back on Wednesday, it might be a bright, bright day and you’ll be able to see a little better.” So I came back on Wednesday and he says, “Oh”, he got eight or ten people he’s checking through there and he says, “Sit down there until I get through these people.” He sat me down about that far from the chart and left me sitting there for nearly half an hour. So I was in the Army when I came out of there.