March 8! What a historic ….

March 8! What a historic day in history. The day I entered the U.S. Army and saved the world from the North Koreans. Only it didn’t turn out that way and there was a story before that.

Seems I was working in South St. Paul and living in a boarding house in St. Paul. President Truman reinstated the draft and that was no problem.

Since I didn’t start work until afternoon, I took the streetcar downtown one morning and registered, just like lots of young men my age. That was 1948.

Somewhere along the line I’d written the St. Paul draft board to tell them I’d moved to Wisconsin. Then along about December 1950, I received a notice for a pre-induction physical. A doctor checking me over for hearing ability must have heard an answer he didn’t like. He just said he’d just talk a little louder.

As a side note I can tell you a grade and high school buddy took his physical the same day and got a 4-F. Football injury.

My boss traveled to Balsam Lake to plead my case for a deferment claiming he needed me at the newspaper. The answer was, sorry he is still under the control of the St. Paul draft board. So that set up the historic day of March 8. I joined a whole bunch of guys from St. Paul and Ramsey County to save the world. And I didn’t know a soul of the near hundred that went too.

The first couple of days were great. We were aboard a train heading to Fort Lewis, Wash. We dined in the dining car and had Pullman beds to sleep on. There we would get our new uniforms, actually leftovers from World War II, write a zillion tests and lose lots of hair on something called the flying ten.

As you have probably known, rumors fly as fast as the wind. Would it be Hawaii, the Presidio of San Francisco or someplace else? It was someplace else; a place called Camp Stoneman just out of Pittsburgh.

Another train ride, but not so pleasant. I was handed a stack of records with a list of names. One was called the group leader and had a check behind his name. That would be me.

I was assured there would be someone to meet us. There wasn’t. But a couple of buses sat outside. I asked about getting to camp and was told to get on one of those buses, so we did. Once inside the gate, the bus pulled up in front of a building with a sign on it, “Overseas Replacements.”

We went in, took a seat, and were handed some forms to fill out. About that time a guy came by and said we must be in the wrong place. He looked at our orders and told us we were in the wrong place and pointed out the direction. All the way there we tried to figure out how he knew that.

Give us ten days until the next batch of recruits came and we could pick them out.

Camp Stoneman was built in 1942 to handle the flow of troops going to war. This was for the Korean War. After a brief period, officially called basic training, I was assigned to the 652nd Heavy Truck Company. The problem was we had no heavy trucks; just some old 6x6’s from WW2.

They would finally arrive 14 months later when we arrived in Goose Bay, Labrador. Not to fight the North Koreans, but to build or expand the air field there to handle the big bombers being used to fight what was later named “The Cold War.”

I never got to drive one of those big 6x6 tractor trailers, as by then I had the title, “Company Clerk.” The young lady in Washington, D.C., who held up the sign that read, “Thank you for your service Robert Berglund,” when I visited there on an honor flight, never knew just how big a service I did for those two years. I just figured, someone had to do it.

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There is just something about a newspaper that catches my eye. Like the 1933 issue of the Loyal Tribune a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I saw the paper coming in the door and right away things go blank. I do remember he liked Harley Hamburgers in Chili and now lives out by Willard. The newspaper was all about changes taking place at the Leader-Telegram in the near future and it will be interesting to see how it works out.

They are moving to what is called a “tabloid” from what we newspaper people refer to as a “broadsheet.” Then on weekends there will just be one paper for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Maybe they are on it already, just haven’t reduced the size. It may work well; but, I recall going the other way from tabloid to broadsheet. It was nice as a full page was a big full page, with lots more inches to sell for advertising space.

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I don’t know how many of you watch the television program on CBS on Sunday morning. I think it is called “Sunday Morning,” and I’ve watched it for years with one thing in mind. To watch where the closing scenes are from. Finally a few weeks ago it was the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. A place I’ve been to. It is 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River and 867 feet from the summit to the base. President Theodore Roosevelt named it the first National Monument on Sept. 24, 1906.

There was some confusion on the name among the Indian tribes in the area. One version was the Bad God’s Tower, which led to The Devil’s Tower.