Kenneth W. Baldridge, Pleasant Grove, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, April 30, 2005: Saving the Legacy tape no. 723

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KEN ETH W. B LDRIDGE PRIL 0 20 BEC: Were you just studying general education subjects? KEN: For the most part. There were a couple of courses that were Navy r lat d taught by Naval officers. One was on Naval Organization. The other one was Naval Reports. But most of it was just general ed classes, then these special Naval courses were taught at the same time. After eight months there, I went up to the University of California at Berkeley. They moved me from the V-12 program into the Naval ROTC program. Now I didn't realize it at the time but I think the Naval ROTC program had been going on, I think, since the 1920's. About 1926, I think, it started. I'd heard of the ROTC for the Army but I'd never heard of the Navy ROTC. It was the Navy counterpart to Army ROTC. So what they were doing, they were just training ... the V-12, I don't know, the Naval ROTC just seemed to be a step up. We wore uniforms more like officers did, except instead of the half-inch braid, I think we had quarter-inch braid or maybe even and eighth-inch. I'm not sure. I remember that in wet weather, we wore raincoats and the plastic cap-cover down over our Naval ROTC insignia and we could almost pass for officers. In fact, we even got salutes, on occasion. We really ate that up, of course. But when I was at Cal, we lived in a dormitory. It had been the Old International House. It had been renamed Callahan Hall. It was named for Daniel Callahan who'd lost his life in the Solomons. That was the name of the house there. We would muster out in front of Callahan Hall in the morning and then march down to the central part of campus and then they'd dismiss us to go our various ways to our classes. So I had moved there in 1944. That's where it kind of got to me, Becky, because at COP, we were a long ways from the ocean but at Cal, we were marching down overlooking San Francisco Bay. We 14