High School

After leaving Irving Junior High School, I attended South High School for two years in Salt Lake City. I was in the ROTC there. The first year we were drilling Manual of Arms in one of the halls using old World War I surplus rifles. Apparently someone had borrowed one of them to go deer hunting and had left a shell in the magazine. When we did Port Arms one of the student’s gun fired. The shell went up through the ceiling and into the room above, but fortunately, no one was hit.

In the second year I was made a cadet captain as plans and training officer. Our commandant was an old World War I solider named Sergeant Sheets. One day as we saw him leaving the far corner of the campus, we decided to play a joke on a fellow student and ordered a cadet corporal to catch him and tell him that we needed several yards of skirmish lines. The obedient student caught Sergeant Sheets and gave him the message. The sergeant recognized the joke and told him, “you go back and get one on them.”

There was heavy competition between South, East and West High Schools. Each year the ROTC had an inspection and a ranking, but South High had never achieved the rating that the other two schools had. We were determined that year to get a high rating. I borrowed field telephones and lines from Fort Douglas and we had communication points set up at various places on our campus. I was president of the radio club and we got an amateur license and somehow obtained radio equipment on the campus.  We put up a big antenna on the building which was there for many years afterwards. The army officer who was reviewing ROTC units rated us very highly and we got our standing.