Part 2 …VIOLATING THE LAW…continued…………

NOTE I suggest that the reader go first to the previous blogs prior to reading PART 2.


I was now in the army. After Pearl Harbor, I had tried unsuccessfully to enlist in Denver, San Francisco, and Oakland, California. I was quite nearsighted and the physical requirements seemed to exclude guys with thick eyeglass lenses. While working at a shipyard in Vallejo, I took a short trip to Los Angeles. While there, I signed in at a recruitment center. A few weeks later, I was surprised to receive a notice accepting me in the army. Because of my age, I still had to get an approval from my father in Texas, and then I was to report to the induction center at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro near L.A.
In my previous blog, I had mentioned that I spent my time from three years of age to seventeen in a children’s home in Denver. Now, two years later, I reported to the Los Angeles induction center. There I found myself in a crowd of young men, draftees and volunteers, waiting to be sworn in to the service. We were told to line up in front of the
desk where we would fill out the forms and be sworn into the armed forces.

I was astounded to find that the guy next to me was Nate Entner, a kid who had grown up with me for many years in the home. He had left the place a few years earlier than I had, and it seemed that he had gone to L.A. to live with relatives. Now he had been drafted. What a remarkable coincidence that, a thousand miles from where we had spent our childhood, we would end up in the same line at that induction center. In the following days, the new recruits were assigned to many different camps to undergo basic training. Now, to add to this freakish coincidence, Nate and I found ourselves assigned to the same basic training center at Camp Haan, near Riverside, California. He was in the barracks adjoining mine. In a few weeks we discovered that there was another ex-homekid, Lester Pinter, at the same camp, but in a different unit. He was a slightly older boy, an excellent musician, who at this time had been assigned to the camp band.

With all of the millions of men in the armed services at that time, what are the probabilities that Nate, I, and Lester as well would be thrown together far from where we had grown up as children in the home?