This is my father when he played baseball at Augusta Military Academy, Staunton, Virginia. That is pronounced "Stan-tun," Yankee. He loved sports. Like all the boys he took boxing, and riding, and played football until a leg injury stopped that. He said he spent much of his youth bewailing his fate, to have missed a career in football, until WWII came and he turned tears into smiles, for the football injury kept him out of the infantry.
He loved AMA. He was voted into the Ad Astra per Aspera Society, the highest honor a cadet could receive. When I was little I asked him what "Ad Astra per Aspera" meant. He said it meant "From s___ to the stars!" When he talked about military school he made it sound like the most wonderful place a boy could be.
The cadets lived in the standard fortress-style barracks, with some of the instructors around for supervision. The dorm had several floors linked by a deep well of wooden stairs. My father told that a favorite activity of the cadets was to take a pail, fill it with small things that could make a noise, like baseballs, and perch it atop an instructor's door. The cadets were silent on their cots, waiting for the old man to turn in for the night. Then - ! The pail came down, the baseballs rained like cannonballs down the stairwell. The cadets hooted and shrieked. Discipline was utterly lost. You always tried to get not caught smoking.
They ran AMA about as close to a military post as they could. At the entrance to the school was a guardhouse manned by upperclassmen. One night my father had guardhouse duty. He was Boss until he began to feel the nicotine bottom out in his brain. When another cadet came by, my father asked him to stand the guardhouse while he had a smoke. The lad surprisingly, suddenly agreed. My father slipped off to have his forbidden pleasure and no sooner did he take a long draw than a loud and tremendous explosion shook everything around. My father flew back to the guardhouse and saw the other cadet flying in the other direction. He saw the remains of a firecracker on the ground and some remains of the guardhouse also.
Colonel Roller, legendary head of the school, caught up with my father that night and asked him where he was when the firecracker exploded. Father knew smoking was forbidden and leaving the guardhouse while on duty was forbidden and that the Colonel, like God, always knew everything. "Sir, " said my father, "I was out of the guardhouse having a cigarette." Colonel Roller looked at him hard and said: "If you had told me anything else, I would have called your father, and you would be out of here tonight." And that was it. The Colonel was loved and feared, and sixty years later my father still spoke admiringly of him. Ad Astra Per Aspera! From s___ to the stars!
I have a placard certifying that my father Received No Demerits in the 1933-1924 session. It is signed by Col.Roller and his son, also a Colonel. Nevertheless, my father seemed to have a good memory for at least one exercise to relieve the weight of demerits,which was to take a wheelbarrow to the coal pile, fill it, and push it back over a plain the size of a football field to the building that housed the furnace, where the colored help hung out. A cadet might get a sentence of 12 loads, or 20, or 5, and since he was kept fit with all the drilling and sports, one could imagine greater impositions on one's freedom than pushing a weight for an hour or so, and afterwards entering the world of Downstairs, receiving motherly sympathy from the ladies that made up to some degree the absence of his mother, and tales of cadets of yore from their kindred bottom-of-the-food chain Black men. Did I mention there was fresh pie and seconds right there, hot from the kitchen, proffered generously to the cadet who had "done his time, " and a clandestine smoke before heading back to the barracks? Like many of the Southern-born cadets, my Yankee father's home came with a husband and wife of the Negro race that ran his parents' household inside and out. Father said he was not altogether averse to get coal-hauling duty because it relieved to a great degree his loneliness,to visit the colored workers at the school. Like the other boys, my father probably spent more time with Grace and Albert Wilson, the highly skilled and dignified couple that worked for his father, than he did his own father and mother. It was as close to home as many cadets would ever get.
Father saved scrapbooks and letters and awards and papers from Augusta. He never made a collection of anything else. AMA closed its doors years ago. There is an alumni association and a little museum in one of the buildings. They do not have a stuffed horse. They might not have a wheelbarrow. I think AMA is in heaven, and they are still training souls for truthfulness and selfless service, souls of every hue and color, and that my father has something to do with it. From s___ to the stars!
