In Episode 2, Dad moved from Camp Barry to Camp Dewey at Great Lakes Naval Station (but Kenny Hill had to stay in holding company).
This episode ran much longer than the first (and thanks for bearing with me while I figure all this out) so I cut a few items from the Great Lakes history list:
- In 1948, Great Lakes opened a boot camp for WAVES (female recruits) which operated for three years until female recruit training moved to Maryland in 1951.
- The 95,000 square foot Gunnery school was dedicated in 1954 at a cost of $2.2 million. Said to be the largest all-glass structure in the world at the time and later called 'the Cathedral of the Cold War', the Gunnery School became obsolete in 2004 due to transition to computer-based training and was demolished in 2012. Imagine building something that could mimic warfare on a full-scale destroyer, and then putting it inside a building made of glass! There's a good article on the demise of building 521 from WBEZ Chicago here.
I promised a few more pictures of Dad at Great Lakes, so here are a few of him in his whites, including with the one used as the Episode 2 art in which he's holding the flag for company 253. I'm guessing he's posing in front of the barracks, but I know for sure it's not the Gunnery School.
About those leggings, here's an interesting visual guide to WW11-era navy uniforms - pictures, with pictures 6 and 7 depicting the leggings as they were worn.
And finally for this episode, the pillowcase! I don't know if this was considered too fancy to use or maybe never matched anyone's decor, but it looks like it was folded and stored but never used much.
Thanks for listening and reading!
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